Beneath the great fortress of Kumbalgarh, Rajasthan
David Cowart
Louise Fry Scudder Professor
Office: 304 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2120
cowartd@mailbox.sc.edu
Full Vita
Education
Ph.D., Rutgers University, 1977
Specialization Areas
- Contemporary American Fiction
Recent Courses
See Course Descriptions for detailed information.
- ENGL 285 Themes in American Writing
- ENGL 288 Survey British Literature to 1790
- ENGL 289 Survey British Literature 1790 to present
- ENGL 385 Modernism
- ENGL 386 Postmodernism
- ENGL 429 Special Topic: Immigrant Writing
- ENGL 752 Modern American Novel
- ENGL 753 American Novel Since WWII
- ENGL 843 Seminars
American Immigrant Writing After 1970
The Encyclopedic Imagination: Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy, Powers
Current Research Project
A book on what I tentatively think of as a post-Pynchon (and post-DeLillo) generation of American novelists. As the early seventeenth century called those influenced by the great Ben Johnson the "Sons of Ben," so might one think of Pynchon's literary offspring as the "Sons of Pyn"-except that literary filiation is no longer so patriarchal as it was in former times: Pynchon has a number of gifted daughters as well. I'm interested in writers who seem to be Pynchon's inheritors: Richard Powers and Stewart O'Nan and Octavia Butler and (with less enthusiasm on my part) David Foster Wallace and T. C. Boyle and Jonathan Franzen. Gloria Naylor may yet write the final volume of the roman fleuve that has its finest chapter -thus far- in Mama Day (1988). These writers seem not to labor under any "anxiety of influence" as they carry forward the project begun by their immediate predecessors: defining a postmodern America.
Though focusing on writers born in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, I will naturally consider the ways in which they relate to their most distinguished predecessors in the generation born in the 30s*not only Pynchon and DeLillo but Updike, Roth, Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and others. How does Naylor rethink Morrison's African American novels of manners and ideas? In what spirit does Chang-rae Lee introduce Asian Americans into the suburbs of Updike and Cheever? What becomes of the encyclopedic novel of Pynchon and Gaddis in the hands of Richard Powers?
Books
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Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Writing in America After 1970 (Cornell University Press, 2006) This study focuses on the contemporary immigrant imagination and its witness. The current generation of transplants emulate not only the first American writers (all born elsewhere) but also such later immigrant literati as Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, Ayn Rand, and Carlos Bulosan. We stand to learn much about the durability of or changes in the American way of life from writers such as Bharati Mukherjee (born in India), Ursula Hegi (born in Germany), Jerzy Kosinski (born in Poland), Jamaica Kincaid (born in Antigua), Cristina Garcia (born in Cuba), Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Wendy Law-Yone (born in Burma), Mylène Dressler (born in the Netherlands), Lan Cao (born in Vietnam), and such Korean-born authors as Chang-rae Lee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Nora Okja Keller writers who in recent years have come to this country and, in their work, contributed to its culture. Of greatest interest are the fictions in which these writers represent not the land they left but the one to which they have come. Theories of ethnicity and national identity tend toward the postcolonial model of past injustice and political aspiration. Considerable academic research has gone into the attempt to articulate the qualities of being an American of African, Asian, Hispanic, or other ethnicity. But these theories require expanding to accommodate the perennial renewal of the melting pot (or salad bowl or mosaic) paradigm among those currently encountering the American myth of promise. Though scholarly studies of ethnic literatures are burgeoning, none focuses exclusively on contemporary immigrant authors. Rather, the prior criticism tends to treat American-born writers of the first generation (Maxine Hong Kingston, Any Tan, Oscar Hijuelos, Paule Marshall, et al) as more legitimate, more central to its theories of ethnic marginalization, than such actual immigrants as Walter Abish, Julia Alvarez, Eva Hoffman, Li-Young Lee, and Junot Díaz. But under the multicultural dispensation dominant since the early 1970s, criticism foregrounding invidious perceptions of race and class seems increasingly at odds with social reality especially (and perhaps surprisingly) when applied to writers who, themselves immigrants, manage a fresher view of America than their already jaded first-generation cousins. |
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Analysis of Don DeLillo's work leads to fresh perspectives on contemporary literature as the critic engages with some of the basic aesthetic principles of the age: the foreshortened view of history, the unmooring of subjectivity, radical discontinuity, replication and parody, awareness of the constructedness of all knowledge and all myths, resistance to closure, indifference to what Lyotard calls "the solace of good forms," and attenuation of depth models--including the linguistic, the psychoanalytic, and the historical. DeLillo may well displace Pynchon as the postmodern Henry Adams. Born exactly one hundred years after Adams, DeLillo is committed, like him, to gauging "the track of the energy" that makes or transforms a civilization. He seems ready to follow that energy into language itself, and he has demonstrated, as Adams did, a willingness to pursue meaning out of one century and into another. Don DeLillo won the SAMLA Studies Book Award in 2003. |
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Literary Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth-Century Writing (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 232pp. |
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History and the Contemporary Novel (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 245 pp. |
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Arches and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 227 pp. |
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Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 154 pp. Second printing, 1982. |
Recent Publications
Courtesy of the U.S. State Department:
an April, 2008 video hookup with Professor Zygmunt Mazur’s
class at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków
“The Power of Language: The Names and The Body Artist,” The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 151-165.
“Teaching Pynchon’s V.,” Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works, ed. Thomas Schaub (New York: MLA Publications, 2008), pp. 88-98.
“Passionate Pathography: Narrative as Pharmakon in Operation Wandering Soul,” Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, ed. Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), pp. 117-133.
“Mental Ecology,” (Rev. The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers), American Book Review,
January-February 2007, p. 16.
“DeLillos intertekster: Noen betraktninger om Love-Lies-Bleeding” (“DeLillo’s Intertexts: Some Observations on Love-Lies-Bleeding,” translated into Norwegian by Frode Helmich Pedersen), Vagant, No. 3 (2006), pp. 119-120.
“David Cowart on Pride and Prejudice,” from “Opening Lines: A Congeries of Reflections,” American Book Review,
January/February 2006, p. 6.
“Heteroclite Historiography: Representations of the Past in Contemporary American Fiction,” Proceedings of the Kyoto American Studies Seminar, August 1-August 3, 2005, ed. Hiroshi Yoneyama (Kyoto: Center for American Studies, Ritsumeikan University, 2006),
pp. 179-199.
“The Eutectic Muse: Recent Immigrant Writing in the United States,” in Language and Identity: English and American Studies in the Age of Globalization Volume 1 Literature, ed. Teresa Bela and Zygmunt Mazur (Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2006), pp. 32-52. Excerpt from my Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America.
Honors and Awards
David Cowart Scholarship endowed by alumnus, 2006
Named Board of Trustees Professor, University of South Carolina, 2006
Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, Japan, 2005
NEH Fellowship (2002-2003)
Fulbright Senior Specialist 2001-2006)
Fulbright Chair in American Studies, University of Odense, Denmark (1996-1997)
Fulbright Chair in American Studies, University of Helsinki (1992 1993)
NEH Summer Stipend (1990)
University of South Carolina Educational Foundation Award (1995)
Michael J. Mungo Teaching Award (1995)
University of South Carolina Amoco Outstanding Teaching Award (1987)
Consulting Editor for Critique
Advisory Editor for Studies in Short Fiction