You will find a publication list at the end, identifying the selected articles.
Wolfgang Karrer
Gayl Jones
Asylum
(1977)
I am interested principally in the psychology of characters - and the way(s) in which they order their stories - their myths, dreams, nightmares, secret worlds, ambiguities, contradictions, ambivalences, memories, imaginations, their "puzzles." For this reason I cannot claim "political compulsions" nor "moral compulsions" if by either of these one means certain kinds of restrictions on "imaginative territory" or if one means maintaining a "literary decorum." ... I am interested in human relationships, but I do not make moral judgments or political judgments of my characters. Sometimes I will allow certain characters to make moral judgments of other characters. I will allow certain characters to be didactic - mostly when I do not share their views. I am not a didactic writer. (Jones 1985)
The repeated negations made by Gayl Jones distinguish her from a number of other black women writers. They also stake a claim for her writing that make her contribution a radical reconstruction of black myths, imposed or self-imposed alike.
"Asylum" is a very short story, containing little more than a thousand words. It comes from Jones' collection White Rat. Short Stories (1977), and it has been reprinted in Helen Washington's Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds (1990: 130-34). (I shall quote from the Washington anthology.)
"Asylum" is a story about a black woman who has been sent to a mental hospital because of her irritating behavior: she has peed into a slop jar in front of her little nephew's teacher, and her sister's daughter, Tony's mother, has arranged for her internment. The woman reports her reactions to the new surroundings.
The extreme condensation of the language, its minimal vocabulary, make the story easy to read. About ninety percent of the 1100 words are monosyllabic. Words with more than two syllables are extremely rare and highly significant. Much of the story is told in Black American grammar, its sounds and structures (Smitherman 1977: 16-35). It seems another exercise at a naturalistic mode with obvious existentialist implications: the victimization of an older black woman in a white institution lends itself to parabolic readings: the black situation in white America, the essential domination and in communication between the two worlds, the ultimate isolation of human beings from each other etc.
Gayl Jones is a highly professional writer. Born in 1949, she became an English major who did her M.A. (1973) and D. A. (1975) at Brown University, both in creative writing. She studied writing with Michael Harper and William Meredith, as well as with her Spanish teacher, Anna Dodd (Jones 1985: 234). Since then she has been teaching students, among others a course entitled "Introduction to the Short Story and the Novel," where she deals with authors like Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer a. o. She particularly likes stories with a pattern of what Robert Stepto calls the "self-invented" or "self-imagined" hero (Jones 1985: 235).
Gayl Jones' professionalism as a short story writer has not cut her off from her roots in Kentucky ("I like the idea of Kentucky in my work") and in the black community:
I used to say that I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the best of my writing comes from having heard rather than read ... My first stories were heard stories - from grown up people talking. ... Hearing has to be essential. You have to be able to hear other people's voices and you have to be able to hear your own voice. (Harper 1979: 352 f.)
In another interview Jones also acknowledges her debts to her mother's storytelling skills (Washington 1990: 126). Thus Jones combines in her work the oral traditions of her community with the literary techniques of psychological analysis in the modernist tradition. "Asylum" is an excellent example of how these two traditions combine.
One of the major achievements of modern fiction lies in the skilful handling of point of view and its theoretical extension, the narrator's discourse (Lanser 1981). We can no longer identify narrator with author. We often have to assume an implied author between author and narrator. Nor can we any longer simply distinguish between first person and third person narrator: the pronouns refer to different levels of discourse as Lanser has pointed out. Nor will it simply do to identify a character in the story through whose perception the story is told with its narrator. Genette has introduced the term "focalizer" for such characters and focalization (fixed or shifting) has become one of the major techniques of modernist fiction (Lanser 1981: 141 ff.). As Gysin points out in his reading of John E. Wideman's story "Fever" (in this volume), black authors make a highly sophisticated use of such multi-layered and shifting focalization.
For all its simple surface, "Asylum" is another example of such use. The nameless woman narrates her own story, focalizer and narrator fall together. Her story graphically divides into three parts. It begins and ends with a question, the last in italics: "Is that the only way I can be freed?" (134). The last words of each section are "room," "pussy," and "freed?", and they map the progress of the story. Section I introduces the asylum, the nurses, the reason for being there, and the first doctor who takes her physical examination. She refuses to take off her "bloomers," and after a psychological test with another doctor, she is led to her room (130-32). Both doctors are white males.
The very short section II (162 words) contains another interview with the second doctor who announces some improvements in her situation (an open floor, less supervision, regular sessions). This section is crucial to my interpretation of the story.
Section III briefly describes a visit from her niece at the end of her first week in the asylum, and it adds yet another interview with the second doctor, a Freudian psychologist, after a month in the asylum. She has had an obviously phallic dream the night before about her physical examinations, and her last verbal exchange with the psychologist is all in italics.
That is all on the story level. We are also given a a moral and a Freudian reading of her strange behavior. The psychologist interprets her behavior in front of the teacher and her little nephew Tony and her refusal to take off her bloomers for the physical examination as a sign of her "sexual amorality." (133) His further tests and her dream about the "big black rubbery thing look like a snake" which the doctor pulls out of her pussy seem to warrant the diagnosis of narcissism: "libido concentrated on herself." (133). The ending of the story could be the beginning of a healing process that will ultimately free her from the asylum:
What does this word make you feel?
Nothing.
You should tell me what you are thinking?
Is that the only way I can be freed? (134)
The readers, if they are to trust the psychologist, would answer with an encouraging "Yes." This seems to be the reading that Mary Helen Washington gives to the story:
Again in "Asylum" the black woman being treated in a hospital for mental patients is unable to defend herself with words. Against a powerful and baffling and painful reality she retaliates with hostility and calculated belligerence. The white hospital is a cold, alien, implacable force - a world in control of her, with names to define her sickness and thus the power to imprison her. Her last question to the doctors shows that she too understands the nature of institutional power and the terms she must submit to it if she wants to be freed. These are the painful details of brutal experiences, endured without consolation. (Washington 1990: 128)
This would make "Asylum" perhaps another example of "madness as an escape from pain" (Collins 1990: 84). I want to prove this interpretation in the victimization matrix (cp. Gates 199O: 16) wrong, completely wrong. At least I want to show that "Asylum" permits a reading that comes to exactly opposite conclusions. Let us look again.
I.
The victimization reading ignores the narrator's discourse. Worse, it takes the white psychologist's point of view that the woman is sick. This reading ignores several important and disturbing hints in the story that this may not be so.
First, there is the narrative situation, the limited point of view. How reliable is the narrator? Second there is the question of her discourse: is she talking or writing? Third, there is the all important question: who is she talking or writing to? Let us take the questions one by one.
The extreme limitation of vocabulary and the narrator's limited insight of what is going on around her make her hardly very trustful. Besides, she really might be mad, and telling us another tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Certainly her odd behavior and her explanation of it seem to support such a reading: "Why did you do it when the teacher came? - She just sit on her ass and fuck all day and it ain't with herself." (132) But this is followed by the key sentence for another reading: "I write that down because I know they ain't going to know what I'm talking about." To begin, this sentence clarifies our second question: the narrator writes her story down. Further, her story has a collective readership, "they," and "they ain't going to know what I'm talking about." Her writing is a way of talking, it reproduces black talk. But that it not all.
Who are "they ?" Who is she writing/talking to? Again, the middle section gives the answer. The psychologist tells her: "You'll have sessions every week. You'll mostly talk to me, and I'll have you write things down everyday. We'll discuss that." (132) Again, the double, now triple interlocking of talking, and writing, and talking about the writing. The narrator keeps a journal for her psychologist, and presumably his colleagues. "They" are the white readership of the imprisoned black narrator. And she writes in black talk as a code so that "they ain't going to know what I'm talking about."
This also seems to answer our third question for the implied reader. But why does the narrator reveal - if only for a moment - her double strategy to write in black talk to a white reader? The Freudian analyst could decode her explanation "She just sit on her ass and fuck all day and it ain't with herself." as "extreme hostility, anal and genital obsession (see bloomers), probably sexual envy and masturbatory habits." We do not know, but this would fit with his annotations "sexual amorality" and "libido concentrated on herself."
In black talk the narrator may be saying something very different: "I wanted to insult her because she is not doing her job right in teaching kids like Tony." She trusts her readers will not understand this explanation. Still, why show her cards? Is it a slip of the pen - arranged of course by the implied author for the benefit of the implied reader - that is erased immediately in a manoeuvre hardly surprising to a Freudian psychoanalyst:
I write that down because I know they ain't going to know what I'm talking about. I write down whatever comes into my mind. I write down some of the things that after I get up I don't remember. (132)
Undoing and rationalization come practically readymade for the psychoanalytical reader: a clear case of "libido concentrated on herself." This seems a clear and hardly isolated case of double coding. And although this talking on "the lower frequencies," as Ralph Ellison put it, would fit well with modernist discourse, it raises new questions of support for her behavior. Why use the slop pail against the teacher, and why risk internment in an asylum for that gesture, if it was a gesture of protest? Why not simply explain it as a gesture of protest and get out? A tragic lack of communication between white and black? Hardly, the double coding points into another direction.
Let us look for support of an even more outrageous reading of the narrator's voice. She does not use only Black American, for instance. She is perfectly capable of reproducing the Standard American (white) sentences of her doctors. She even uses words like "physical examination," "intelligent person," "supervision, "sexual amorality," or libido. No hesitancy (as in Finnegans Wake) about spelling.
She reproduces three-part paratactic sentences of her interlocutor without problems (131). Hers is a clear case of heteroglossia, or speaking in tongues (Henderson 1990). She reports speech directly and thus solves and inverts an old problem of black narration: how can a narrator frame black dialogue in Standard American without assigning it a substandard value in the polyphony of the novel (Karrer 1977). In "Asylum" Black American frames as the narrator's discourse white Standard American Speech, which contains long polysyllabic words, but (so far) little understanding.
That is not all. The dialogue the narrator reproduces also contains her own words, as form of accounting what she said to the doctors. She gets sassy with the first physician ("I ain't got nothing down there for you." 131) and scores a success for herself: the doctor turns red, the black nurse is tempted to laugh.
The narrator hedges in her first interview with the psychologist about her reasons for her behavior:
Do you know why they brought you here?
I peed in front of Tony's teacher.
Did you have a reason?
I just wanted to.
You didn't have a reason?
I wanted to.
What grade is Tony in?
The first.
Did you do it in front of the little boy?
Yeah, he was there. (132)
This exchange from the doctor's side serves to find out in how far the patient understands her situation, is responsible for her actions, and leads to his first evaluation of "sexual amorality." His euphemism "do it" clearly contrasts with the narrator's uninhibited use of "pee, pussy, ass, fuck." Little does the doctor know that he is being tested for reliability. She does not yet trust him with an explanation, but she clearly signifies something at him which he does not catch. The psychologist concludes his first interview with a formulaic "You have had a long day" to dismiss her. To which the narrator replies: It ain't as long as it could have been," a highly charged speech act, carrying locutionary, perlocutionary, and illocutionary charges (Lanser 1981: 72 ff.). No wonder the psychologist is startled: "What do you mean? - I look at his blue eyes. I say nothing. He acts nervous. He tells the nurse to take me to my room. She takes me by the arm. I tell her I can walk. She lets my arm go and walks with me to some other room." (132)
Each word counts: "my room/other room," for instance, or the simpler perlocution "I can walk." The nurse understands the signifying, and lets her arm go. The doctor feels he has been signified at, and acts nervous: the narrator can read his order to the nurse as a signal of nervousness. She knows she has challenged his authority. She also signifies to the implied reader: "tells" is an important word and carries at least three different meanings in the quote.
Before I try to further decode the sentence "It ain't as long as it could've been," let me adduce another example of signifying at the psychologist, a seemingly rather obtuse specimen of his kind.
The second interview brings an approaching between narrator and doctor. She hands him a heavily coded explanation of her behavior, insisting on "ass, fuck all day" against his squeamishness, he hands her certain a relaxation of authority over her: another floor, the sun room, less supervision. He concludes his offer with "You'll mostly talk to me, and I'll have you write things down every day. We'll discuss that." She answers to that: "I'll be in school. - He says nothing. I watch him write something down in a book." (132). This is the strongest signifying that the narrator will allow herself for the benefit of her psychologist and the implied reader. She compares her situation to school, she makes a highly significant parallel between herself and Tony, himself and the teacher. Of course, the psychologist misses this hint. (So did Washington, I'm afraid.)
The narrator is using the asylum as a schooling that she did not (could not?) have outside. Her signifying suddenly makes sense if we only put it together: "I'll be in school - It ain't as long as it could've been - She just sit on her ass and fuck all day and it ain't with herself - I peed in front of Tony's teacher." Her behavior is perfectly consistent if we assume behind her signifying her decision to use the asylum as school. Other strange behavior patterns suddenly fall into place. With her niece, for instance, who comes to visit her. Her sister's daughter is after all responsible for her internment. The narrator scares her off with a cock and bull story about "this long black rubbery thing comes out of my bowels." She can be sure that the niece will carry this back to the psychologist to keep her longer in the asylum. For the benefit of her reader/teacher/psychologist she invents this dream about "this big black rubbery thing look like a snake out of my pussy" to discuss it next morning with her analyst. She may not have read about Freud's thesis of "penis envy," nor the feminist criticism of that assumption (Mitchell a. o.), but she certainly knows what a Freudian psychoanalyst expects from her. She may not know - the implied author and reader know - about the feminist origins of bloomers, but she certainly knows that keeping her panties on after peeing in front of a little boy will create a problem for the doctors that they will love to solve.
Why does the narrator want an education in the asylum and how does she get it? By not showing her cards and peeking at the doctor's. "He thinks I don't know what he put. He thinks I can't read upside down." (133). She studies him and reads his cards upside down. She also heavily signifies at the implied reader and the analyst: will they be able to follow her feat and read her story "upside down ?" She at least is a fast learner, and holds her language well while learning the other. How does she sound? The ending of the story now acquires a completely different reading:
What does this word make you feel?
Nothing.
You should tell me what you are thinking?
Is that the only way I can be freed? (134)
Now, the answer is "No." Empowerment through learning, through turning the situation upside down, is another. Room and pussy, section I and II are pure trapping: the narrator will decide when to be free, and her freedom goes - it always does in African American narrative through literacy. Hopefully, the doctor/teacher will learn something from it, too. She will help him. She told him (in her writing) that she can read upside down.
She helped us, in our role as implied readers. By identifying us with the analyst/reader of her tale she casts us in the role of the white male Watson, the slightly obtuse reader, always ready to get on with the job of making sense of the tale as fast as possible. But our analytic task in interpreting will lead us to the right passages and their signifying: the tale may be written "upside down" but it does not exclude its white male readers. At least in my interpretation it did not.
II.
Simply put, the story offers two readings. I shall call them victimization and empowerment. The first was presented by Mary Helen Washington. The second by me. Do these readings exclude each other? I do not think so. Let us return to her central hint: "I'll be in school" (132).
My reading suggests a triple superimposition of frames (in Goffman's sense of frame analysis, 1974 and his work on asylum interactions):
TEACHER: PUPIL:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
III. Implied Implied
Author Reader
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
II. Psychoanalyst Narrator
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I. School Teacher Tony
The story is told mainly on level II, and all signifying starts here. Level I is embedded - as a tale within a tale - and framed in level II. And level III arises from the fact that the narrator is talking and writing at the same time. It is tempting to use this double analogy ("I'll be in school") for polarizing the story into authority and submission, male/female, white/black. But the gender polarizing does not work: the narrator is female. So is the school teacher. Nor does the race polarization work: the implied author is black. The school teacher also may be black. As for class domination: a closer reading of the narrator (level II) reveals that white control of the situation is far from unchallenged.
The story sets up dichotomies: class, gender, and race are on opposite poles on all three levels. But the story breaks them down by slipping form one pole to the other: binarizing is subverted by signifying, and the story leaves it open who is in charge. What the narrator (II) lacks in power, the implied author (III) makes up in control. The story turns the tables on the psychoanalyst and leaves him and the implied reader (us) at the mercy of the implied author's voice. This narrative strategy breaks down objectification:
In either/or dichotomous thinking, difference is defined in oppositional terms. One part is not only different from its counterpart; it is inherently opposed to its "other." Whites and Blacks, males and females, thought and feeling are not complementary counterparts - they are fundamentally different entities related only through their definition as opposites. Feeling cannot be incorporated into thought or even function in conjunction with it because in either/or dichotomous thinking, feeling retards thought, values obscure facts, and judgment clouds knowledge.
Objectification is central to this process of oppositional difference. In either/or dichotomous thinking, one element is objectified as the Other, and is viewed as an object to be manipulated and controlled. (Collins 1990: 69)
When the doctor "tells" the nurse to take the patient to her room, and the patient "tells" the doctor her story, then the simple pun deconstructs institutional authority (the doctor's) through the self-authentification of the voice (the narrator's). Stepto's concept of authentification (1979) relies on a revision of what Lanser calls status, contact, and stance in the narratorial voice (1981: 149-225). This revision has become a major device in Afro-American narrative (Smith 1987). The woman escapes objectification as "patient" by (re) creating herself as author of her tale. And the story breaks down polarities "crucial to the logic of our culture's rhetoric about race and sex" (Wallace 1992: 60). This leads us to another aspect of the story. Objectification and its deconstruction happens not only in the discourse, but also in the story "Asylum" has to tell.
III.
It is tempting to read the psychoanalyst as the Other, the white man who cannot be moved from his oppositional difference. His evaluations of his patient seem to be the ultimate example of unfeeling objectification. Worse, far from being "scientific" categorizations, his evaluations could be read in the very old tradition of stereotyping and of white racism. "Sexual amorality" could mean: "absence of a white middle class moral standard," something neutral like Durkheim's anomie, or it could be a biased moral judgment. The same holds true for "libido:" a technical term in Freud's energy model or simply a code word for lust? It is quite possible to read the doctor's evaluation as an objectification of the narrator as a Jezebel:
One of the most prominent images of black women in antebellum America was of a person governed almost entirely by her libido, a Jezebel character. In every way Jezebel was the counterimage of the mid-nineteenth-century ideal of the Victorian lady. She did not lead men and children to God: piety was foreign to her. She saw no advantage in prudery, indeed domesticity paled in importance before matters of the flesh. (White 1985: 29)
Beneath the asylum tale lies the slave narrative. The narrator's voice tries to escape objectification by self-authentification very much like Harriet Jacobs did in the guise of Linda Brent. "Asylum" is a parable about objectification like "The Education of Mingo" or "Meditations on History" (both interpreted in this volume). Charles Johnson and Sherley Anne Williams give us a conclusion to their parables: Mingo and Dessa escape into freedom, with or without their oppressors, the Other. At least in the case of Dessa, language becomes an important strategy of resistance (Kekeh 1992). Gayl Jones leaves her parable open: "Is that the only way I can be freed?" (134)
But there is a possible way out. Just before that final exchange in italics, the psychologist runs an association test with the narrator:
If the sounds fit put them there.
They don't fit.
How does this word sound?
What?
Dark? Warm? Soft?
Me?
He puts down: libido concentrated on herself.
In a startling revelation, similar to Dessa's "I bes," the narrator tries to show herself as a human being, not a psychological object to him. She fails, however, to make him understand how he sounds. (The words have a different meaning in Black American.) But she will not give up. She underlines her last exchange with the analyst for his and our benefit: every word is overcoded or (in the analyst's terminology) overdetermined, and what he cannot catch in talking to her he might catch in reading her underlined passage. The woman will not give up, even after his "upside down" annotation, she will go on teaching him, because who else is going to educate the educators? Gayl Jones certainly is no didactic writer, her protagonist could be one. (Does this mean she disagrees with her protagonist?) Thus, the ending of the story in italics could be read as the continuing hope that one day the white male look, the objectifying professional gaze will change.
There is more at stake than terminology or image control. "Asylum" restages the whole concept of a realistic or naturalistic story. If this reading of "Asylum" relies mainly on the story level II, then the inversion of authority and voice becomes one of realism and modernism as well:
Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the "minor" has the advantage of cutting across some of our stereotypes or doxa about the political as the subversive, the critical, the negative, by restaging an affiliated conception of art in the new forcefield of what can be called the ideology of marginality and difference - perhaps, in our time, the strong form of what used to be populism and what is probably the the dominant ideology in the Western left today. (Jameson 1992: 173)
It is tempting to follow this up in terms of the Kafka interpretation by Deleuze and Guattari. It cannot be done here, although "Asylum" seems to owe to the Kafka tradition.
IV.
It is useful to think of "Asylum" as a sculpture. Ward has proposed this approach for Jones' fiction:
... thinking in fiction is like thinking in sculpture. The sculptor does not think in material (stone, metal, plastic, clay, wood) but in space and in the possible distributions of spatial form. Likewise, fiction writers do not do their major thinking in words. Lexical items are servants to configurations of action, feeling, event, situation, visions. ... The writer attempt to make temporal abstractions derived from human behaviors comprehensible in a text. Fictive configurations, like stone, are givens. The determining process of thinking in fiction elaborates what we assume to be true about human beings and their environment on a symbolic level. Thinking in fiction is at the very core of intertextuality, for the writer is using previous "texts" of human actions to fable yet another text. (Ward 1985: 250)
"Asylum" draws indeed on a long line of asylum stories and forms part of an ongoing thought process in Jones about madness and its social definition (Ward 1985: 249).
Both Byerman (1985) and Dixon (1985, rev. 1987) have detailed this theme in Gayl Jones' novels Corregidora (1975) and Eva's Man (1976). Dixon highlights the "emotional silence" in the novels, the suppressed subtext of what cannot be said, and Byerman has a perceptive analysis of "madness" in Eva's Man. Koenen (1985) has explored self images and female identity in Gayl Jones's fiction. Even the stories collected in White Rat (1977) bear out a reading in terms of a fictional construction of madness, and a succumbing to it as a failure of empowerment. In "White Rat," the protagonist is caught in the myth of the tragic mulatto, in "The Return: A Fantasy" Joseph begins his progressive descent into a Kafkaesque world of irreality with a reading of "The Transformation" (cp. Ward 1985: 252 f.)
The classical places for madness and asylum in modern African American fiction probably are "The Golden Day" and the lobotomy scene in Invisible Man, both ambiguous and subversive parables of control or destruction and rebirth. The formation and defining exclusion of madness has also made a highly charged European discourse during the last two centuries as Michel Foucault has shown in his numerous writings on the birth of the prison, madness and society, supervision and punishment (cp. Byerman 1985: 171-216). This discourse has been extended to the American prison writing in the seminal book by H. Bruce Franklin (who seems not to have read Foucault). Prison Literature in America. The Victim as Criminal and Artist, in its expanded edition (1989) traces a tradition that moves from the slave narratives to Attica (1971) and beyond. This tradition is largely - although not exclusively - a black one. Herman Melville plays a central role in this tradition also for black writers (273). "Asylum" may owe to "Benito Cereno," but the nonfictional equivalent of "Asylum" is, of course, the prison experience in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver's writings, Angela Davis, George Jackson's Soledad Brother, and the emerging woman prisoners' writings in the United States (Franklin 1989: xix- xxii; 233-276).
The traditional myths of the ascent and immersion narrative (Stepto 1979: 95-194) both focus on the journey motif. Spatial and social mobility seem to guarantee each other and they do support a basic American ideologeme of mobility. But the "pregeneric quest for freedom and literacy" so ably traced by Stepto (1979: ix ff.) has generated a third myth which radically denies mobility, whether up or down. Stepto called it "hibernation" (167 f.). We could also call it the empowerment myth. The prison or asylum serves as a place of (temporary) enforced immobility which leads to self-confrontation, learning, rebirth. It is an obvious modernization of the Jonah-and-the-Whale myth, and of the Subterranean retreat in writers like Herman Melville, Fjodor Dostoiewski, Richard Wright, Thomas Pynchon, or Ralph Ellison (cp. Dixon 1987 for the underground as symbolic geography). It seems a particularly apt myth for the difficult period after 1972 sometimes labeled as the "retreat to the ghetto" (cp. Karrer 1982).
"Asylum" can draw on a rich intertextuality of black prison writings, a pregeneric quest model, and two symbolic myths which it subtly inverts. It can do without specific verbal echoes or allusions. Its intertextuality is structural (Karrer 1985) or, as Henry Louis Gates would put it, of the "Signifying Monkey" kind:
My theory of interpretation, arrived at from within the black cultural matrix, is a theory of formal revision; it is tropological; it is often characterized by pastiche; and, most crucially, it turns on repetition of formal structures and their difference. (Gates 1984: 285 f.)
"Asylum" does not need specific parallels to Malcolm X or Angela Davis. Its story might as well come from an oral tale told in a black neighborhood in Michigan or Kentucky. It is "Every Woman's Blues" since Bessie Smith. But its intricate double structure of normality/madness, domination/subversion, whiteness/blackness, reason/imagination place it in a central tradition of black myths and story telling ever since tricksters like Brer Rabbit fell into the briar patch (Thomas 1988: 11-42; 81-110). X is a trickster, cunningly hiding under her assumed madness. Masking is one of the oldest devices of African American literature to counteract the objectifying "Look" of the Other.
Since Sartre developed that theme - as an existentialist variation on the theory of racism - the problem that the white/normal subject needs the Other to constitute itself has become a device shared by majority and minority writers alike. Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner and the death of Joe Christmas is all about that. But so is Focus (1945) by Arthur Miller or Andorra (1962) by Max Frisch. Black Literature has amply dealt with the Look, the stereotypes imposed, and the fixation of the Other. And as Charles Johnson has shown (1988: 3-29), being and race has always been thought about by black writers as a "crisis of identity," deriving from outside image control, and as a defense against the Look by masking or revaluation of those images.
Gayl Jones has categorically rejected any attempts to line her work up with "identity quests" and other such critical containments (Jones 1985: 234). The "self-imagined hero" of Stepto's coinage comes closer to what she attempts to show in "Asylum." Jones thinks in fiction, as Ward has pointed out. The configuration of madwoman and doctor is a potent spatial distribution that allows her to dramatize and synthesize a highly complex literary tradition that reaches into the core of the Black Experience in North America, and that resounds with all its intertextual reverberations of an African drum. Signifying as Gates or "touch talking" as Miss Hazel in Bambara's story "My Man Bovanne" (McMillan 1990: 34) calls it.
Image control means for black women writers two different lines of negations: negating the destructive stereotypes imposed on black women from a basically white mainstream culture, and still massively distributed today through electronic media. The Black Mammy and the Jezebel stereotypes have been the two most pernicious splittings of the image (cp. Starke 1971). But black women writers also have to negate the images the black male literary tradition has imposed on them (Wallace 1992: 63). Walker's mother figures in "Everyday Use," or "Nineteen fifty-five" have to be read as counterimages signifying on that stereotype tradition. And Shange's, Bambara's or Shockley's young heroines ably dissociate themselves from any Jezebel perceptions. Thus, Jones' fiction is part of an ongoing process in rethinking black women's roles in US society (cp. Christian 1980; Pryse/Spillers 1985; Willis 1987; Carby 1987; Hernton 1987; Braxton 1990).
But Gayl Jones, as her opening statement makes abundantly clear, also dissociates herself from any pressures on how to present women that might come from the black community itself or even by the politics of the feminist black community:
Sometimes politics or political strategies, like any kind of strategy and system, can be useful in the organization and structuring of one's work, the selecting of character, of event, the choosing of ideas, but it can also tell you what you cannot do, tell you what you must avoid, tell you that there's a certain territory politics won't allow you to enter, certain questions politics won't allow you to ask - in order to be "politically correct." (Jones 1985: 234)
The nameless narrating woman of "Asylum" is certainly a problematic character. Her behavior in front of the teacher and her little nephew seems to confirm the worst stereotypes about black lower class women. It could be questioned whether such a story helps to improve the image of black women in the mainstream culture or whether it would not be more prudent to suppress such depictions.
By questioning the very process of such image makings, Jones in "Asylum" also subverts such questions of political correctness. She does not eliminate the class dimension from her analysis of sexism and racism: both are embedded in a situation of institutional domination. Positive counterimages ("Me?") will simply not do without changing the power relations, the multiple levels of domination. This can happen only through empowerment, and empowerment goes through (re) learning ("I'll be in school."):
Empowerment involves rejecting the dimensions of knowledge, whether personal, cultural, or institutional, that perpetuate objectification and dehumanization. African-American women and other individuals in subordinate groups become empowered when we understand and use those dimensions of our individual, group, and disciplinary ways of knowing that foster our humanity as fully human subjects. This is the case when Black women value our self-definitions, participate in a Black women's activist tradition, invoke an Afrocentric feminist epistemology as central to our worldview, and view the skills gained in schools as part of a focused education for Black community development. C. Wright Mills (1959) identifies this holistic epistemology as the "sociological imagination" and identifies its task and its promise as a way of knowing that enables individuals to grasp the relations between history and biography within society. Using one's standpoint to engage the sociological imagination can empower the individual. 'My fullest concentration of energy is available to me,' Audre Lorde maintains, 'only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition ..." (Collins 1990; 230)
Schooling cannot consist in patient listening to teachers. The narrator may pick up a word here and there from her analyst, but her learning works through dialogue. In this she follows an Afrocentric tradition as reclaimed by Bell Hooks, Geneva Smitherman, Ruth Shays, June Jordan a.o.:
"Dialogue implies talk between two subjects, not the speech of subject and object. It is a humanizing speech, one that challenges and resists domination," asserts Bell Hooks (1989, 131). For Black women new knowledge claims are rarely worked out in isolation from other individuals and are usually developed through dialogues with other members of a community. A primary epistemological assumption underlying the use of dialogue is assessing knowledge claims is that connectedness rather than separation is an essential component of the knowledge validation process ... This belief in connectedness and the use of dialogue as one of its criteria for methodological adequacy has Afrocentric roots. In contrast to Western, either/or dichotomous thought, the traditional African worldview is holistic and seeks harmony. (Collins 1990: 212)
The narrator of "Asylum" does not necessarily look for harmony, nor does she live in her community. But she uses dialogue to assess knowledge claims as a means of empowerment. And she not only learns from the dialogues she wrote down, she also tries and continues to try to share knowledge to change those who try to objectify her. Whether she entered the asylum deliberately or not, once she is there, she uses it to free herself. And there are more than one way to be freed personally: instead of being freed by the analyst she could free him, transform the asylum and ultimately the reader of her tale. All you have to do is listen closely to the voice:
What does this word make you feel?
Nothing.
You should tell me what you are thinking?
Is that the only way I can be freed? (134)
LITERATURE
Braxton, Joanne M. (ed.) Wild Women in the Whirlwind. Afro-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Byerman, Keith Eldon. Fingering the Jagged Grain. Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens etc.: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood. The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York, etc.: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists. The Development of a Tradition. 1892-1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston, etc.: Unwin Hyman, 1990.
Dixon, Melvin. "Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels of Gayl Jones." In: Evans 1985: 236-48.
Dixon, Melvin. Ride Out the Wilderness. Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Evans, Mari (ed.) Black Women Writers. Arguments and Interviews. 1984. Repr. London, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985.
Franklin, H. Bruce. Prison Literature in America. The Victim as Criminal and Artist. 1978. Expanded Ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (ed.) Reading Black, Reading Feminist. A Critical Anthology. New York, etc.: Penguin, 1990.
Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York etc.: Harper, 1974.
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." In: Gates 1990: 116-42.
Hernton, Calvin C. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life. New York: Anchor Press, 1987.
Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York, London: Routledge, 1992.
Karrer, Wolfgang. "Richard Wright: Fire and Cloud." In: The Black Short Story in the 20th Century. A Collection of Critical Essays. Amsterdam: Gruener, 1977, 99-110.
---- "Integration and Separatism: The Social History of the Afro-American Dilemma after World War I." In: The Afro-American Novel since 1960. Ed. P. Bruck and W. Karrer. Amsterdam: Gruener, 1982, 29-52.
---- "Intertextualit„t als strukturelle und elementare Reproduktion". In: Intertextualit„t. Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien. Ed. U. Broich and M. Pfister. Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1985, 98-116.
Kekeh, Andr‚e, "Lieux et strat‚gies de r‚sistance dans le discours romanesque de Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, et Sherley Anne Williams," Afram Newsletter 35 (June 1992), 19-24.
Koenen, Anne. Zeitgen”ssische Afro-amerikanische Frauenliteratur. Selbstbild und Identit„t. Frankfurt: Campus, 1985.
Lanser, Susan S. The Narrative Act. Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
McMillan, Terry (ed.) Breaking Ice. An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction. New York etc.: Penguin, 1990.
Pryse, Marjorie and Hortense J. Spillers (eds.) Conjuring. Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin. The Language of Black America. 1977. Repr. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.
Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Starke, Catherine Juanita. Black Portraiture in American Fiction. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
Ward, Jerry W. Jr. "Escape from Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones." In: Evans 1985: 249-57.
Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil. A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Thomas, H. Nigel. From Folklore to Fiction. A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel. New York, etc.: Greenwood Press, 1988.
Washington, Mary Helen (ed.) Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds. Stories by and about Black Women. New York, etc.: Doubleday, 1990.
White, Deborah. Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York, London: Norton, 1985.
Willis, Susan. Specifying. Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
JONES BIBLIOGRAPHY
FICTION:
Corregidora. New York: Random House 1975.
Eva's Man. New York: Random House 1976.
White Rat. New York: Random House 1977.
Song for Anninho. Detroit: Lotus, 1981.
The Hermit Woman. Detroit: Lotus, 1983.
INTERVIEWS:
"About my Work." In: Evans 1985: 233-35.
"Gayl Jones: An Interview." with Michael S. Harper. In: Chants of Saints. A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Eds. M. S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979, 360-75.
"Interview" with Roseann P. Bell. In: Sturdy Black Bridges. Visions of Black Women in Literature. Eds. R. P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979, 282-87.
----------------------------------------
ARTICLES / AUFSÄTZE:
2011
“Sobre el nuevo cuento de Rolando Hinojosa Smith” Escritores del Mundo 11 (enero 2011)
http://www.escritoresdelmundo.com/2011/01/sobre-el-nuevo-cuento-de-rolando.html. (visited 04.02. 2011)
2010
“Intertextuality in Conversation (1984)” http://intertextuality.webs.com/conversation.htm
“Rolando Hinojosa – A Character Index to the Novels.” http://www.wkarrer.webs.com/
“Blind 'Lemon' Jefferson – The Songs.” http://www.wkarrer.webs.com/
“Blues and Jazz in/as African American Poetry.” http://www.wkarrer.webs.com/
“Modern Poetry and Is Genres – The Rise of Secular Meditation.” http://www.wkarrer.webs.com/
2009
“Drastic Community. Wallace Stevens and Mussolini.” http://www.wkarrer.webs.com/
„Reconceptualización de las Investigaciones folklóricas en la Argentina, 1966-2006.“ Revista de Investigaciones Folklóricas 24 (2009),.
„USA“, „Vortizismus“, „Harlem Renaissance“, „Beat Generation“. In: Metzler Lexikon zur Avantgarde. Hg. W. Fähnders. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler,2009.
"Hacer Creer. Estrategias narrativas en testimonios de los últimos ranqueles". RUNA 30,2 (Dic. 2009), 103-18. . ISSN 1851-9628.
http://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?script=sci_serial&lng=en&pid=1851-9628&nrm=iso
„Narrativa folklórica, creencias y la construcción de la identidad masculina en la cultura Selk’nam”. Actas de las Jornadas del Cuento Folklórico. Santa Rosa, La Pampa: 2008, en preparación.
2008
„Life Telling. Power and Discourse in Life Stories of Mexican Immigrants to the United States.“ In: Interpreting the New Milenio. Ed. José Antonio Gurpegui and Carmen Gómez Galisteo. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 272 -279.
.
„Historias de vida y estrategias discursivas de inmigrantes mexicanos en los EE. UU.“ Revista Aleph 145 (abril/junio 2008). http://www.revistaaleph.com.co/article.php3?id_article=211.
2006
„Narración, marco de la narración, y el cuento folklórico.” Actas de las Jornadas del Cuento Folklórico. Santa Rosa, La Pampa: 2006, 1-26.
„Limit Thinking and Boundary Rhetoric. A Genealogy of Borders.“ Focus. Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies (Pécs, Hungary, 2006), 12-37.
2005
„Kubanische Exilliteratur in den USA.“ In: ExilBilder. Lateinamerikanische Schriftsteller und Künstler in Europa und Nordamerika. Hg. Sebastian Thies, A Susanne Doelle und Ana María Bieritz. Berlin: W. Frey, 2005, 171-83.
„Region – Nation. Von Machiavelli zu Habermas und virtuellen Räumen.“ In: Regionaler Kulturraum und intellektuelle Kommunikation vom Humanismus bis ins Zeitalter des Internet. Festschrift für Klaus Garber. Hg. Axel E. Walter. New York, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2005, 303-24.
„Prólogo.“ En: Narrativa: Identidades y Memorias. Comp.. María Inés Palleiro. Buenos Aires: Editorial Dunken2005, 11-14.
2004
„Decolonization in Thomas Pynchon’s V.: Fascism, Colonialism, and the Historical Novel. “ In: Against the Grain / Gegen den Strich gelesen. Studies in English and American Literature and Literary Theory. Festschrift für Wolfgang Wicht. Hg. Peter Drexler und Rainer Schnoor. Berlin: Trafo, 2004, 181-199.
„Realism and Real Estate in Rolando Hinojosa's Klail City Death Trip Series. “ En: Perspectivas Transatlánticas en la Literatura Chicana. Ensayos y creatividad. Ed. María Herrera-Sobek, Francisco Lomelí y Juan Antonio Perles Rochel. Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2004, 167-80.
2003
„Der politische Mythos der Revolution im Opernlibretto Troubled Island (1949) von Langston Hughes.“ In: Politische Mythen und nationale Identitäten im (Musik-) Theater. Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger Symposions 2001. Hg. Peter Csóbady u.a. 2 Bde. Anif / Salzburg: Verlag Mueller-Speiser, 2003, Bd. II, 629-41.
„Cyberpunk Fiktionen und Netzwerkgesellschaft.“ In: Anderswelten in Serie. Dokumentation einer Tagung der Evangelischen Akademie Tutzing in Kooperation mit der AVJ – Arbeitsgemeinschaft von Jugendbuchverlagen e. V. vom 21. Bis 23. Juni 2002. Hg. Roswitha Terlinden und Hans-Heino Ewers. Tutzing: Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, 2003, 53-72.
2002
„Raymond Williams: Vom „Kultur“ Begriff zur Kulturanalyse.“ In: Kulturwissenschaftler des 20. Jahrhunderts. Hg. K. Garber. München: Fink, 2002, 335-348.
„Postcolonial Identity Politics in Chicano Movement Rhetoric and Literature.“ In: AZTLÁN. Ensayos sobre literatura chicana. Ed. F. Egiluz et al. Vitoria: Universidad del Pais Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea,2002, 129-142.
„Dylan Thomas.“ In: Metzler Lexikon englischsprachiger Autoren. Hg. A. Nünning. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2002.
„Joyce’s Oxen of the Sun Chapter: Parody or Pastiche? “ Focus. Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies (Pécs, Hungary, 2202), 68-80.
2001
„Black Modernism? The Early Poetry of Jean Toomer and Claude McKay. “In: Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. G. Fabre and M. Feith. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP,2001, 128-141.
2000
„Texas Cultures / The Uses of Regionalism. “ In: Regional Images and Regional Realities. Ed. L. Hönnighausen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000, 205-212.
„Mythos und Geschichte im New Yorker Symposion über Intellektuelle und Religion (1950).“ Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica Gesellschaft 2 (2000), 43-58.
1999
„Dante-Spiegelungen: Episteme und Mimesis bei Neruda, Fanon, Weiss und LeRoi Jones.„ In: Die Wunde der Geschichte. Aufsätze zur Literatur und Ästhetik. Festschrift für Thomas Metscher zum 65. Geburtstag. Hg. K. Garber und H. G. Klaus. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 1999, 241-61.
„Von Minoritätenliteraturen Nordamerikas zu Minoritätenforschung im anglophonen Bereich.“ In: Profile der Wissenschaft. 25 Jahre Universität Osnabrück. Hg. R. Künzel u. a. Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 1999, 81-96.
(zusammen mit Sigrid Markmann)
1998
"Horror als Buch-Video: Stephen Kings Erzählwelten." In: Unterhaltungsliteratur der achtziger und neunziger Jahre. Hg. D. Petzold und E. Späth. Erlangen: Universitätsbund, 1998, 141-59.
1997
" A Frolic of His Own", "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home", "The House on Mango Street", "The Mixquiahuala Letters", "The Road to Tamazunchale", "The Woman Who Owned the Shadows" und "Fisher, Roy" in Kindlers neues Literaturlexikon. Supplement Band. München: Kindler, 1997. (rev. In 2005)
„Cross-Dressing between Travesty and Parody, „ in: Parody: Dimensions and Perspectives. Ed. B. Müller. Amsterdam, Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 1997, pp. 91-112.
„Gnomon and Triangulation: The Stories of Childhood, „ in: New Perspectives on Dubliners. Eds. M. Power and U. Schneider. Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997, pp. 45-68. [European Joyce Studies, 7]
1996
"Rap als Jugendkultur zwischen Widerstand und Kommerzialisierung", Gulliver 38 (1996), 21-44.
"Gendering Mexico: USA und Mexiko in gegenseitiger literarischer Wahrnehmung", Literatur Sprache Kultur. Studien zu Ehren von Lothar Knapp. Hg. W. Asholt und S. Kanngießer. Osnabrück: Secolo, 1996, 103-119.
"Rockets as Power Icons in German and U.S. Popular Media," in: American Popular Culture at Home and Abroad. Ed. L. H. Carlson and K. B. Vichcales. Western Michigan University: New Issues Press, 1996, pp. 211-228
"Fantasy-Elemente in Forbidden Planet und Shakespeares The Tempest" anglistik und englischunterricht 59(1996), 71-82.
1995
"Myths of Masculinity in Tierra Amarilla by Sabine R. Ulibarri." In: Sabine R. Ulibarri. Critical Essays Ed. Maria I. Duke Dos Santos and Patricia de la Fuente. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995, 148-61.
1994
"Nostalgia, Amnesia and Grandmothers: The Uses of Memory in Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature". In: Memory, Narrative and Identity. New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures. Ed. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern University Press 1994, 128-144.
"Transplanting American-Style Science Fiction to West Germany." In: Popular Culture in the United States. Eds. Peter Freese and Michael Porsche. Essen: Die Blaue Eule 1994, P. 371-386.
1993
"Undocumented Immigrants and the Mexican-U.S. Border," Gulliver 23 (1993), 7-22.
"Multiculturalism and Literary Canon Formation in the United States." In: Kulturen in Kontakt. Hg. S. Markmann. Hamburg: Dr. Kovač: 1993, S. 197-214.
"Introduction, The History and Intertextuality of the African American Short Story," in: The African American Short Story. 1970 to 1990. Ed. W. Karrer and B. Puschmann-Nalenz. Trier: WVT 1993, p. 1-12.
"Gayl Jones: Asylum (1977)," in: The African American Short Story. 1970 to 1990. Ed. W. Karrer and B. Puschmann-Nalenz. Trier: WVT 1993, p. 89-103
"John McCluskey: Lush Life (1990)," in: The African American Short Story. 1970 to 1990. Ed. W. Karrer and B. Puschmann-Nalenz. Trier: WVT 1993, p. 205-222.
"Gender and the Sense of Place in the Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Rolando Hinojosa." In: Gender, Self, and Society. Proceedings of the IV International Conference on the Hispanic Cultures of the United States. Ed. R. v. Bardeleben. Frankfurt M. etc.: P. Lang 1993, p. 237-245.
"Kennedy und die Kuba-Krise (22. 10. 1962): Zur Imperialen Rhetorik der Eindämmung" In: Die Rhetorik amerikanischer Präsidenten seit F. D. Roosevelt. Hrsg. Paul Goetsch, Gerd Hurm. Tübingen: Narr 1993, S. 141-152.
1992
37."Borderlands: Chicanos im Südwesten und ihre Kultur". In: Multikulturelle Gesellschaft. Kanada und USA. Hg. H. J. Vollmer. Augsburg: AV-Verlag 1992, S. 149-166.
1991
"Discursive Strategies in James Baldwin's Essays." In: James Baldwin. His Place in American Literary History and His Reception in Europe. Ed. Jacob Kollhöfer. Frankfurt etc.: Peter Lang 1991, pp. 111-128.
"Titles and Mottoes as Intertextual Devices". In: Intertextuality. Ed. Heinrich F. Plett. Berlin, New York: W. Gruyter 1991, pp. 122-134.
"Transformation and Transvestism in Eva Luna by Isabel Allende." In: Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende's Novels. Ed. Edna Aguirre Rehbein and Sonia Riquelme Rojas. Frankfurt, New York: P. Lang 1991, pp.151-164.
1990
"Modernismus und Realismus in Sherwood Andersons Dark Laughter." Gulliver 28 (1990), 71-77.
"World's End? Upton Sinclair and World War I." In: Upton Sinclair. Literature and Social Reform. Ed. Dieter Herms. Frankfurt etc.: Peter Lang 1990, pp. 39-51.
1989
"Groteske", "Humor", "Ironie", "Parodie", "Satire", "Witz", Tragikomödie". In: Harenbergs Lexikon der Weltliteratur. Autoren - Werke - Begriffe. Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation 1989, 5 Bde.
"Autobiographie", "J. F. Cooper", "B. Franklin", "W. Gaddis", "Im Dickicht der Kindheit", "J. Jones", "Lederstrumpf", "N. Mailer", "Die Nackten und die Toten", "J. C. Oates", "Verdammt in alle Ewigkeit", "E. Wilson". In: Harenbergs Lexikon der Weltliteratur. Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation 1989, 5 Bde.
"Childwold", "JR", "Marriages and Infidelities", "them", "Yonnondio". In: Kindlers neues Literaturlexikon. Hg. Walter Jens. 20 Bde. München: Droemer Knaur 1989-
"G. Stein's Poetry: From Cubism to Embroidery, 1914-1933". In: Poetry and the Fine Arts. Papers from the Poetry Sessions of the European Association for American Studies Biennial Conference, Rome 1984. Ed. R. Hagenbüchle and J. S. Ollier. Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet 1989, pp.124-137.
1988
"Alternatives Drama und Theater der achtziger Jahre in den USA", anglistik & englischunterricht 35 (1988), 121-136.
"From Cultural Nationalism to Liminality: Minority Literatures in North America". In: Minority Literatures in North America. Ed. W. Karrer and H. Lutz. Osnabrück: University of Osnabrück 1988, pp. 1-79.
(together with H. Lutz)
1987
"Lyrik als politischer Diskurs der 60er Jahre ", Gulliver 21 (1987), 79-92.
1986
"Zur Kulturpolitik der republikanischen Rechten nach 1980". EAST 7 (1986), 612-616.
"Englischunterricht im Nationalsozialismus. Zu Reiner Lehberger". EAST 8 (1986),
328-332.
"The Novel of Narcissism: Jerzy Kosinski". In: Essays on Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. H. Bock and A. Wertheim. München : Hueber 1986, pp.243-260.
"Sein und Sehen in John Ashbery's 'Leaving the Atocha Station': Die Verdinglichung des modernistischen Paradigmas". In: Tradition und Innovation in der englischen und amerikanischen Lyrik des 20.Jahrhunderts. Hg. K. J. Höltgen, L. Hönnighausen, E. Kreutzer, G. Schmitz. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1986, S.163-175.
"Probleme, Perspektiven, Prioritäten einer kritischen Anglistik. Ein Rundgespräch". Gulliver 20 (1986), 57-77.
(zusammen mit G. Ecker, R. Hillgärtner, D. Keiner, J. Kramer)
"Parody, Travesty, and Pastiche Qua Communication Processes" (translated by A. Wall) and "Author's Postscript". In: Essays on Parody. Ed. Clive Thomson. Toronto: Victoria University 1986, pp.3-35. (Monographs, Working Papers and Prepublications of the Toronto Semiotic Circle, 4)
(partial translation of the book on parody 1977)
1985
"Pulp Magazines: Zu ihrer Geschichte, Struktur und Funktion". anglistik & englischunterricht 25 (1985), 81-96.
"Intertextualität als strukturelle und elementare Reproduktion". In: Intertextualität. Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien. Hg. U. Broich und M. Pfister. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1985, S.98-116.
"Pressewesen, Karikatur und Photographie". In: Propyläen Geschichte der Literatur, Band V, Berlin: Propyläen Verlag 1985, S.118-159.
1984
"Die Friedensbewegung in den USA". In: Krieg und Frieden. Osnabrücker Vorlesungen 1983/84. Hg. W. Aschmoneit und M. Daxner. Osnabrück: Selbstverlag 1984, S.270-281.
"Jack London: The Iron Heel (1908)". In: Die Utopie in der angloamerikanischen Literatur. Interpretationen. Hg. H. Heuermann und B. P. Lange. Düsseldorf: Bagel 1984, S.176-195.
1982
"Integration or Separatism: The Social History of the Afro-American Dilemma after World War I." In: The Afro-American Novel since 196O. Ed. P. Bruck and W. Karrer. Amsterdam: Grüner 1982, pp.29-52.
"Multiperspective and the Hazards of Integration: John Williams' Night Song (1961)." In: The Afro-American Novel since 196O. Ed. P. Bruck and W. Karrer. Amsterdam: Grüner 1982, pp.75-101.
"The Novel as Blues: Albert Murray's Train Whistle Guitar (1974)." In: The Afro-American Novel since 1960. Ed. P. Bruck and W. Karrer. Amsterdam: Grüner 1982, pp.237-262.
1981
"Buster Keatons The General: Zur Fiktionalisierung des amerikanischen Bürgerkriegs". anglistik & englischunterricht 13 (1981), 83-94.
"Parodie und Travestie in den Massenmedien und im Alltagsverhalten der USA". anglistik & englischunterricht 15 (1981), 37-60.
1980
"Patrick Kavanagh". In: Einführung in die zeitgenössische irische Literatur. Hg. J. Kornelius, E. Otto, und G. Stratmann. Heidelberg: Winter 1980, S.197-210.
"Amerikastudien/American Studies und amerikanische Landeskunde". anglistik & englischunterricht 10 (1980), 55-68.
1979
5."Aspekte einer Studienreform: z.B. Osnabrück". Gulliver 5 (1979), 79-105.
(zusammen mit Tilman Westphalen, Sigrid Markmann, Helmut
Vollmer)
1977
"Zur Analyse von Comics: Am Beispiel Dennis the Menace". anglistik & englischunterricht 2 (1977), 93-1O8.
"Richard Wright: Fire and Cloud." In: The Black Short Story in the 20th Century. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. P. Bruck. Amsterdam: Grüner 1977, pp.99-110.
1976
"A Chomsky Bibliography." Language Sciences 4O (April 1976), 8-16.
1973
"Theorie literarischer Texte und Methoden des Zugangs." In: Die Literatur. Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder 1973, S.391-417.
(Zusammen mit Georg Behse und Jochen Schulte-Sasse)