Tim Lanzendörfer, Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel

Book Review| January 01 1966 The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel by Jonathan Baumbach The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. By Baumbach, Jonathan. New York: New York University Press, 1965. Pp. 173. $5.00, cloth; $1.95, paper. Louise Y. Gossett Louise Y. Gossett San Antonio College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1966) 65 (1): 156–157. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-65-1-156 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Louise Y. Gossett; The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel by Jonathan Baumbach. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 1966; 65 (1): 156–157. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-65-1-156 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1966 by Duke University Press1966 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

As one of the essential mediums of global cultural communication, American films, especially those involving women’s themes, have played a key role in shaping and transmitting women’s images and ethical concepts. The diversity of women’s roles and deep-seated emotions in contemporary American films with women’s themes is reflected in changes in society’s understanding of women’s status and rights. This paper aims to examine the impact of ethical views presented in contemporary American female-themed films on society and the audience. By collecting and analyzing popular American female-themed films in recent years, it explores ethical issues and the portrayal of women in the movie. Of the 100 films studied, more than 60% present a strong ethical tendency towards female self-identification and autonomous choice, with 40% showing a clear tendency towards gender equality and anti-discrimination. We find that the images of resilience and independence shown by female characters in movies in the face of difficulties and challenges have positively impacted the values and behavioral patterns of predominantly female audiences. Contemporary American women’s films not only reflect the current social concern and exploration of women’s issues, but also promote the public’s awareness of gender equality and women’s rights through the portrayal of diversified and profound women’s images, and provide an essential perspective for the promotion of social progress and the development of cultural pluralism.

Journal Article Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel; The Continuity of American Poetry; Gertrude Stein Get access Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. By Ihab Hassan. Oxford (Princeton U.P.). 48s.The Continuity of American Poetry. By Roy Harvey Pearce. Oxford (Princeton U.P.). 60s.Gertrude Stein. By Frederick J. Hoffmann. Walt Whitman. By Richard Chase. Wallace Stevens. By William York Tindall. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. 5s. each (paper). Derek Stanford Derek Stanford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 14, Issue 80, Summer 1962, Pages 68–69, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/14.80.68 Published: 01 July 1962

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources — 2020 Brittany Hirth (bio) The following is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2020 including books, book chapters, and journal and magazine articles. Individual essays included in books not solely centered on Roth are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style. The final section lists a few notable essays. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing, but they can be easily accessed online. Brittany Hirth Brittany Hirth is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Arts and Letters at Dickinson State University, where she teaches twentieth century and contemporary American literature. She has published articles on Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Anthony Swofford. BOOKS O’Brien, Dan. Fine Meshwork: Philip Roth, Edna O’Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature. Syracuse UP, 2020. Google Scholar Taylor, Benjamin. My Friendship with Philip Roth. Penguin, 2020. Google Scholar BOOK CHAPTERS Baumgarten, Murray. “Philip Roth, Jewish Identity, and the Satire of Modern Success.” History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band, edited by William Cutter and David C. Jacobson, Brown Judaic Studies, 2020, pp. 289–300. Google Scholar Brauner, David. “‘Being Jewish’: Philip Roth, Antisemitism and the Holocaust.” Howard Jacobson, Manchester UP, 2020, pp. 141–97. Google Scholar Coste, Jacques-Henri. “Revisiting Business History through Capitalist Fiction: The Glove-Making Industry in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.” The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel, edited by Jacques-Henri Coste and Vincent Dussol, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 297–317. Google Scholar D’Alfonso, Francesca. “Philip Roth e la fenomenologia della paura: per una lettura del romanzo Nemesis.” Oltre la pandemia: Società, salute, economia e regole nell’era post Covid-19, vol. 1, edited by Gianmaria Palmieri, Editoriale Scientifica, 2020, pp. 781–91. Google Scholar Eaton, Mark. “Secular Theodicy: Saul Bellow, E.L. Doctorow, and Philip Roth.” Religion and American Literature since 1950, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 161–99. Google Scholar Hadar, David. “Negotiating Continuity: Writing about Philip Roth in Israel.” Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 127–41. Google Scholar Kellman, Steven G. “Four Score and Philip Roth.” Rambling Prose: Essays, Trinity UP, 2020, pp. 126–33. Google Scholar Kirsh, Adam. “Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth.” The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century, Norton, 2020, pp. 112–22. Google Scholar Lambert, Josh, Rachel Gordan, Benjamin Schreier, Bettina Hoffman, and Julian Levinson. “Four Approaches to Teaching Goodbye, Columbus.” Teaching Jewish American Literature, edited by Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein, MLA, 2020, pp. 317–27. Google Scholar Maxey, Ruth. “Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in Contemporary American Fiction.” 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past, edited by Ruth Maxey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 149–69. Google Scholar Mitchell, Kaye. “The Shame of Being a Man: Humiliation and/as Heroism.” Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect, edited by Kaye Mitchell, Edinburgh UP, 2020, pp. 199–244. Google Scholar Nell, Werner. “Überschaubare Nachbarschaft? Religion, Macht und Sexualität in der Kleinstadt: Eine Adoleszenz-Erzählung von Heinrich Böll mit einem Blick auf Philip Roth.” Kleinstadtliteratur: Erkundungen eines Imaginationsraums ungleichzeitiger Moderne, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, transcript, 2020, pp. 347–72. Google Scholar Peleg, Yaron. “Writing New Kinds of Jews: A Course in Literary Genetics and Masculinity.” Teaching Jewish American Literature, edited by Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein, MLA, 2020, pp. 183–89. Google Scholar Schreier, Benjamin. “Introduction: What’s the ‘History’ in ‘Jewish American Literary History’ the History Of?” The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity, U of Pennsylvania P, 2020, pp. 1–36. Google Scholar Shostak, Debra. “The Father in the Apocalyptic Imagination — Part Two: Politics and 9/11.” Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 171–96. Google Scholar ———. “Middle-Class America at Mid-Century.” Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 51–92. Google Scholar Wasserman, Sarah. “Counterhistory, Counterfact, Counterobject: Philip K...

Reviewed by: The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo Joseph Dewey Stephanie S. Halldorson. The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007. 223 pp. $79.95. Tuning in to cnn, I happened to catch the story of a middle-school kid in the Midwest who was riding his usual bus home when he noticed the driver had slumped over the wheel Thinking quickly, the youngster commandeered the wheel and, with the help of a friend who worked the brake, pulled the bus off the road to safety, cnn had dubbed the kids “School Bus Heroes.” Heroes? It is not to diminish the kids’ gutsy actions, but when it comes to heroes, contemporary American culture suffers from an embarrassment of riches. Like other terms that once held privilege and gravitas in the American imagination—like “visionary,” “soul,” “prophet”—the word “hero” has been so widely (mis)appropriated as to have become devaluated, even [End Page 254] diminished. Twenty-four-hour news channels routinely elevate cancer researchers, firefighters, soldiers in harm’s way, missionaries in remote postings among the poor and diseased, muckraking journalists, patients who overcome disabilities, celebrities who raise money for disaster victims, athletes who make late-game plays, convenience store clerks who thwart late-night burglaries, and, well, two kids who pull over a school bus—it goes on and on. Far more disturbing, of course, is the suasive power of fantasy heroes. For those under, say, twenty, heroes exist in an entirely symbolic landscape, in pretentious graphic novels (read: comic books), cheesy summer action flicks, multi-volume fantasy epics, animated movies, and, supremely, video games. We begin to lose the dimension of the authentic hero, that rare iconic figure, subtle and nuanced, able to give voice and direction to a culture’s evolution, to embody a people’s greatest aspirations and its noblest failures. Of course, what has noticeably given way in any discussion of heroes in the last generation or two is the privileged position literature once held and its role in the American experiment to define the distinctly American hero. Books? Unless they are set in alternative universes with enchanted unicorns and magic stones, books ... well, in these latter days of the Age of Reading, being a good reader has the same quaint nostalgia of being, say, a good butter churner. But before we eulogize literature and surrender to the coaxing pull and easy argument of image technologies, you might pause to consider, indeed relish, the breadth and reach of the implications of Stephanie S. Halldorson’s probing study, a striking reminder that contemporary American literature, seriously conceived and passionately committed to its cultural moment, can still, even in these dreary post-post-whatever-we’re-in era, rise to the occasion, can still define for its era the parameters of its highest aspiration, and can still engage without simplification the implications of the American endeavour even as it is being played out, reclaiming the grandeur of the kind of heroes who, unlike the faux-heroes that pop up seasonally at the Cineplex or daily on cnn, are subtle, nuanced, provocative, and who invite us to engage our cultural moment and the implications of where we all stand, characters who prick us, intrigue and perplex us. Halldorson reminds us early on that Pynchoris shabby schlemiel, which has become the dominant manifestation of contemporary American literary heroes, need not be the last word. We are, as it turns out, better than that. Contemporary heroes, in an intricate dynamic with those legions of non-heroes, struggle with their identity in an endless process of definition and redefinition (unlike ancient heroes who undertook a single grand journey); they defy the status quo, asserting [End Page 255] both intellect and heart amid and against their vacuous culture of ashes and shadows, images and surfaces. For scholars of postwar American fiction, Halldorson’s study rescues two towering figures from their own critical legacy. Saul Bellow has become decidedly old school, unjustly marginalized amid the hip academic excesses routinely lavished on much lesser novelists who...

Reviewed by: The American Novel Now: Reading Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980 Christopher Kocela Patrick O'Donnell . The American Novel Now: Reading Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. xi + 234 pp. Readers, teachers, and specialists will welcome Patrick O'Donnell's new book as an engaging introduction to a broad range of intersecting aesthetic and political developments in American fiction over the past three decades. Penned by a leading authority in the field, The American Novel Now is intended, in its author's words, "for readers interested in gaining both an expansive perspective about what has happened in the world of contemporary American writing, and insight about an array of particular novels that . . . urge one to read more" (x). Throughout, O'Donnell's concern for his reader is manifested in the careful balance he strikes between comprehensive overview and close analysis of individual texts; the result is an eminently teachable book that sheds new light on established authors and encourages discussion of many others less widely studied. [End Page 773] The American Novel Now is divided into five parts, not including a brief preface and epilogue. Part 1, "Before 1980," addresses numerous stylistic and thematic features of American fiction between 1945 and 1980, presenting these as harbingers of greater diversity to come. Here O'Donnell introduces, through comparative analysis of Saul Bellow's Herzog, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, his "symptomatic" method of reading contemporary fiction, which presents groupings of novels "not as merely representative of some tendency or significant development in recent fiction, but as indicative of the 'condition' of contemporary writing, manifesting its most deeply felt quandaries" (25). Each of the four remaining parts of the book makes good on this promise of a symptomatic reading by presenting, at the outset, a broad problem or condition to which post-1980 American fiction is seen as responding to in various ways. The motivating condition in Part 2, "From New Realisms to Postmodernism," is that famously described by Philip Roth in 1960 as the near impossibility of the novelist to "make credible" much of contemporary American reality (34). O'Donnell then explores individual symptoms of this condition under subheadings such as "Dirty Realisms" and "Only Wor(l)ds," which he uses to group, respectively, the often violent realism of Chuck Palahniuk, Dorothy Allison, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Richard Price, and the linguistic experimentalism of Donald Antrim, Fanny Howe, Rikki Ducorcet, David Markson, and Ben Marcus. Part 3, "Becoming Identities," presents the "explosion of theory" and the simultaneous "explosion of the canon" (82) in the 1960s and 1970s as the underlying impetus for a number of novelistic symptoms ranging from the redefinition of character as voice in Joanna Scott's The Manikin to the interrogation of racial passing in Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist. Part 4, "What Happened to History," addresses novels "that take history (or its disappearance) as their subject" (125); here a subsection entitled "Narrating Vietnam" presents Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, Tim O'Brien's Things They Carried, Susan Fromberg Shaeffer's Buffalo Afternoon, Stewart O'Nan's The Names of the Dead, and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country as evidence that "imaginatively, Vietnam continues to be the symptomatic historical black hole of the contemporary era" (151). Finally, Part 5, "Relations Stopping Nowhere," examines how, in an era of globalization and increasing xenophobia, notions of family and community are interrogated in novels by (among others) Marilynne Robinson, Gloria Naylor, Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Jamaica Kincaid. By my count, O'Donnell's symptomatic reading extends to seventy-six novels in total, providing a panoramic account of post-1980 American fiction that captures the remarkable heterogeneity of the [End Page 774] period while emphasizing its continuity with what came before. The American Novel Now makes no case for a sea-change in American fiction after 1980; rather, its great usefulness derives from the way it identifies paradigmatic aspects of contemporary writing so as to stimulate comparative readings of both long-established and lesser-known authors. As O'Donnell writes in the preface, "one of the goals of this book is to invite the kinds of...

Guantánamo: An American History

Introduction. The article explores the image-symbol of water, the semiotic means of its realization in the novels by American writers of different ethnoidentity Toni Morrison “Beloved” and Joyce Carol Oates “Black water”. An image-symbol is understood as such a sign, which is a component of the semiotic fabric of literary prose text, endowed with significantethno-cultural information and is considered to be an ethno-cultural image-symbol. The specifics of contemporary American multicultural prosaic texts is in their relating to the mythology, ethnocultural customs and traditions, beliefs of ethnicity living on the territory of the contemporary United States. Various cultural codes are accumulated in the text canvas of literary works, which serve as markers of belonging to a particular culture. The symbol of water depicts the archetypal knowledge of American and African-American ethnicity about worldview and cultural memory. It encodes the various ethno-cultural and axiological values and their hierarchy inherent in the studied ethnicities. The image symbol of water from texts of contemporary American writers of different ethnic identity is a sign of the ethno-cultural worldview and world perception of African-American and American people and embodies different ethno-cultural codes.Purpose. The article aims at linguosemiotic constructing the image-symbol of water in contemporary American multicultural prose.Methods. The paper is based on such scope of methods, as textual and contextual analysis, the linguosemiotic method, the method of contrastive and descriptive analysis, the linguocultural method and the method of linguistic interpretation the semiotic sense of the image-symbol.Results. In the novel “Beloved” by T. Morrison, the symbolic significance of water is revealed to characterize the novel's main character, Beloved, who symbolizes the individual and collective past of the African American people. The symbolic meaning of water in Joyce Carol Oates's novel “Black water” is radically rethought and, unlike the analyzed novel by T. Morrison,is the epitome of dark matter that robs a young girl of her life. Linguosemiotic features of the analyzed symbol are identified in the paper.Conclusion. The descriptive-contrastive analysis of the image-symbol of water in the texts of American writers of different ethnical identity has allowed us to characterize the different semiotic properties of this symbol in Toni Morrison, in which it symbolizes a return to life, resurrection and rebirth, and in Joyce Carol Oates's novel, in which it is highlighted thesymbolic meaning of death. It is found that in the analyzed texts, the image-symbol of water serves as a marker of change in the status of the character, and its symbolic characteristics reproduce the transition from one state to another, from one reality to another. The perspectiveof our further investigation will be working out the methods and ways of decoding the hidden meanings in literary multicultural texts with ethnocultural sense, the study of multilevel textual means of creating the literary images of resilient women as components of the literary space.Therefore, each linguistic sign is regarded as a component of the semiotic fabric of the prosaic text, endowed with meaningful ethno-cultural information and considered as ethno-cultural image-symbol.

Efforts to define globalization often are delimited by concrete articulations focused on and about the economic and political processes within a global sphere. These processes dominate global studies in economics, feminism, history, law, sociology, and literature. “Permeable Boundaries: Globalizing Form in Contemporary American and British Literature” is an interdisciplinary literary study that explores how gender, racial, and ethnic categories are connected not through economic models, but through the subjective processes of agency, self-identity, and narrative making. These discrete processes of consciousness expand how globalization is imagined through the human condition. Engaging with American and British texts focused on the global cities of London and New York offers new ways to think about how marginalized individuals and communities make choices and view themselves as central protagonists in their lives. Globalization can be viewed as more than an economic construction that leaves those without capital on the margins as victims and rubes. This examination is about finding the means to embrace an English vernacular as more than a construction of Western hegemony that marginalizes those with no economic or political clout. I draw on feminist readings from second and third wave feminists in the development of this argument, but am not interested in a proscriptive fix that simply replaces a dominant gender or racial construct with another, just as constricting construction. Rather, I add to existing discussions of globalization and literary studies by raising questions of agency, identity, and narrative form in an effort to show how consciousness both influences and is influenced by the global sphere. The feminist readings are engaged with sociology, history, psychology, political science, law, as well as narratological theory that focuses on how narrative is formed through agency and self-identity. As case studies, my chapters offer readings of Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Louise DeSalvo’s Casting Off (1987), and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011).

Interrelation of literary and linguistic aspects in translating prosaic literary works - a contemporary American novel - into Russian is dealt with. Paramount attention is focused on the most significant literary aspect - the protagonist’s figure and its characterization formulated by the author of the original as well as her peculiarities recreated and represented in the translated text. The protagonist’s main features are defined concretely on the basis of the authorial description and characterization of her appearance, behavioral, psychological and some other personal individual traits represented in detail in the original, but, however, either deliberately distorted or erroneously translated. The methodology of research is based primarily on the comparative linguistic analysis of relevant excerpts taken from the original and its published translation. Special attention is paid to the results of the performed distortions followed by the authors’ detailed commentaries and, in most cases, their own suggested versions of contextual correspondences. A strictly systematized explicit classification consisting of four types of the translation invariant’s violation, defined and exposed by the authors, will, hopefully, help systematize them while teaching translation to philology students as well as caution translators of literary prose, both beginners and advanced ones, against making mistakes of this sort in their practical creative activities.

Contemporary American poets do not care for Victorian poetry. For evidence of this assertion we might look at the November/December 2007 issue of The American Poetry Review: What trace of the Victorian, if any, do we see? Paul Muldoon, an Irish transplant, vouchsafes an interview about Byron (Romantic, not Victorian, but nineteenth-century at least.) (1) A poem by Stefi Weisburd titled Descent of Man would have been impossible without Lyell and Darwin (not poetry, but Victorian); it mentions neither those Victorian scientists nor the pregnant contemporary phrase intelligent design, but their influence is obvious: Vestigial footprints, of human, of beast/score the earth like musical notes, / and what a beautiful score it is, only / the believers are too hoarse to sing. (2) Half of almost every page is blocked off for advertisements for new collections, editions, works of criticism, and creative writing programs, and these include a notice for a Bilingual 50th Anniversary Edition of C. F. Macintyre's Symbolist Poetry and an epigraph by Flaubert gracing the advertisement for the James A. Michener Center for Writers MFA in Writing (France, not Britain). The many prizes are named after modernists: the 2007 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, The Robinson Jeffers Tor House 2008 Prize for Poetry, the W. B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Ira Sadoff's History Matters: A Minority Report mentions James Wright, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Emily Dickinson. Reginald Gibbons's essay On Apophatic Poetics mentions Catullus, Aquinas, Horace, Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Andrei Voznesensky, and Emily Dickinson--the last apparently a blow for the nineteenth century, but American. Yet Victorian Aestheticism has left accidental, unremarked, but decided traces on the landscape of contemporary American poetry in the French forms, especially the villanelle, which Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Reading and Writing Metrical Verse defines as follows: A poem of nineteen lines, set out in five tercets and a final quatrain. The poem works on only two rhymes; the first line and the third line of the initial stanza are repeated, exactly or almost exactly, throughout the rest of the stanzas, as follows: a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a,a. (3) The villanelles and triolets and rondeaux and ballades beloved of the Aesthetes were endangered for most of the twentieth century, but the villanelle in particular is now a common animal in the biome of contemporary American poetry. Its nineteen lines, its five tercets and single quatrain, its two rhymes and two alternating refrains habitually appear in anthologies and little magazines and MFA theses and Collected Works. Although our sample issue of The American Poetry Review does not itself house an example, the catalogs of names that appear in every advertisement of a poetry program or event will inevitably include burnished contemporary American poets who have written villanelles. The full-page advertisement for the 2008 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference and Bookfair has the wherewithal to print pictures, not just names, of the enticing authors who will be there: excluding the prose writers, the list consists of Sonia Sanchez, James Tate, Yusef Komunyakaa, Louise Gluck, Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, and Natasha Trethewey. Mark Strand's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 collection Blizzard of One included the double villanelle Two de Chiricos for Harry Ford, and in 2000 Strand co-edited The Making of a Poem: A Northon Anthology of Poetic Forms, which began with a long entry on the villanelle. Natasha Trethewey also won the Pulitzer for her 2006 Native Guard, which includes the altered villanelle Myth. (4) The other poets attending the 2008 AWP conference might eschew the writing of a villanelle, but they do not ignore it. …

Preface Africa: What Place Is This? Antecedents: African Settings in British and American Fiction Before World War II Filling in the Blank Space: Contemporary American Novels Set in Invented African Nations Black on Black: African-American Novels with African Settings Genre Africa Africa: Postmodern, Postcolonial, and Other Wise Conclusions: African--A Continent of Words Bibliography Index

Previous articleNext article FreeCary Nelson The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+716.Tim MorrisTim MorrisUniversity of Dundee Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore“Handbook” is perhaps a rather quaint and misleading name for this collection from Oxford University Press. The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry is certainly not a volume for quick reference or fact-checking. The twenty-six substantial essays collected here are instead broadly concerned with mapping out recent critical terrain, addressing controversies between “cultural,” “historicist,” “formalist,” and other critical methods, and perhaps meditating more energetically (and anxiously) on the task of literary criticism than on the varied poets and poetry used for illustration.It is a very self-conscious exercise, and there is a sense throughout this collection that the critic of modern and contemporary American poetry must be pointedly concerned with his/her place in the intellectual economy. If, as the current British government seems to believe, there is little economic case for the humanities, then what are critics of poetry for? These pressures seem to drive both the individual essays and the overall structure of this book.In his introductory essay, the volume’s editor, Cary Nelson, repeats the warning against the canonization of a few major figures and writes: “This collection was assembled on the principle that no contributor bore sole responsibility for discussing any given poet” (4). The organizing principle appears, instead, to be that these critics eschew grand pronouncement and value judgment in favor of a more painstaking archival retrieval of poetry among its social contexts. Nelson calls this “textual recovery and critical rereading” (7). The implication, of course, is that poetic history must be revisited over and over, since the myopia of the first reactions and readings must be constantly corrected. Yet this is a volume with definite biases its of own.Indeed, with the notable exceptions of Peter Nicholls’s essay on poetry and rhetoric, Charles Altieri’s on Cezanne’s influence, and Walter Kalaidjian’s on psychoanalysis, these essays tend to privilege “recovery” of new social contexts and minority writing over detailed and sophisticated readings. This has been and remains a perfectly virtuous intention, in my view, and it is informative and refreshing to read overviews of Asian American poetry, disability poetics, American Indian poetry, and “ecopoetics” in the period, to name just a few. But there is a tendency in these pieces to lose analytical pressure in the readings in proportion to the more general need to fill in some critical territory, to “recover” groups of poets from academic inattention.There is an old joke about a man who pays an obscene amount for a watch. He tells his friend, “It’s dropproof, waterproof, shatterproof, bombproof, will withstand any pressure, and survive a nuclear winter.” “What happened to it?” his friend asks. “I lost it,” the watch buyer replies. So too this leftist agenda of recovery, a thoroughgoing rejection of New Critical formalism and the highly unstable value judgments with which the subject of English seized its initial independence, can be protected from all accusations of not sufficiently reimagining the connections of poetry to our wider society’s minorities and minority beliefs—but on too many occasions, a sense of what defines poetry is lost.Perhaps that’s no bad thing. If American poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, written from a highly developed capitalist society, can barely distinguish itself from mass culture, news, prayer, or environmental protest (to name but a few notable contexts here), then critics should rightly feel hesitant about its special difference. This hesitancy marks a number of essays in this collection, and poetry increasingly comes to be seen as the writing that most effectively allows other discourses to attach to it, either instrumentally or by chance.Rachel Blau DuPlessis faces some of these questions in her “Social Texts and Poetic Texts: Poetry and Cultural Studies.” She attempts to chart a middle way between the broad categories of the inviolate “aesthetic” and the entangled “historical.” She rehearses effectively and in broad terms some of the key battle lines of this distinction before coming to rest at a reading method she terms “social philology or socio-poesis” (66). One can have one’s formalist cake (there are linguistic elements absolutely distinct to the way poetic language operates) and eat it too: “Ideologies and social meanings…are condensed in and propelled by these linguistic and rhetorical choices” (66). This essay is an important opening statement for the collection. But Nicholls returns to rhetoric more generally in a later chapter, reminding us that rhetoric conceived as an empty formalism “constitute[d] the pole against which modernism would aggressively define itself” (174).Rereading and recovery do lead to a number of interesting arguments in several of these essays. Melissa Gerard argues convincingly against the model of “sentimental modernism” (97) that has framed modernist women’s poetry and obscured the aesthetic ambitions and complexity of poets such as Elinor Wylie, Louise Bogan, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Robert Dale Parker makes the case for a fresh approach to American Indian poetry, arguing that “instead of writing to serve colonialist curiosity, Indian poets write for their own purposes, both politically and aesthetically” (89). Mark W. Van Wienan examines the poetry of political prisoners, countering what he identifies as “critical apathy toward openly political poetry” (564). Lynn Keller’s essay on “green reading,” dealing with environmental criticism, acknowledges this “still emergent discourse” (602), though it’s hard to agree that experimental poetry concerned with green issues “can move humans to change or to make environmentally beneficial changes” (621).In some cases, the very categories announced by this collection’s title are placed under scrutiny. Timothy Yu’s essay on transnationalism and diaspora ponders whether the very category of “American poetry” is now obsolete, like the Romantic body made obsolete by the digital poetics discussed by Adalaide Morris. Yu concludes that “a transnational reading of American poetry does not mean rejecting the national framework entirely, but it does mean recasting the United States as a node of exchange for political, social and economic flows—forces that help shape the form of modern American poetry” (626).There is a tension across the collection between the reconsideration of long-held critical templates of the “modern” and the need to hold open the diverse practices, forms, and contexts that illuminate the “contemporary.” The breadth of this book means that there are considerable, and often very productive, conversations across and between the various contributions. A notable example is the appearance of William Carlos Williams’s “To Elsie” (1923) as a poem hospitable to readings concerned with aesthetics, class, economics, consumer culture, and, in Kalaidjian’s essay, psychoanalysis.This volume also displays some notable absences. It perhaps surprising that the work of Marjorie Perloff, Helen Vendler, and Harold Bloom is barely mentioned, despite their considerable influence on accounts of modern and contemporary American poetics. The ambition to avoid “big beast” canonical modernists does leave them rather artificially absent, though Pound and Eliot remain touchstones for many of these critics.As a teaching tool, this collection will undoubtedly find its way onto reading lists as important secondary reading, particularly because it usefully brings together a generation of critics who are actively widening the scope of research in the subject through close attention to new forms and critical frameworks. However, there remains an overall impression that this is a collection driven by a sense of a humanities casting about for its relevance and organized by the impact agenda.It now appears deeply contrary to persist in the belief that poetry, or literature more generally, may have no definable social or economic role. This volume is an interesting case study in that criticism focused on “relevance” and the relentless search in academic humanities for “new ground” to cover. The results are frequently interesting and informative, but it can leave one hankering nostalgically for those old value judgments and critical battles, and it confirms the suspicion that literary studies are somewhat beleaguered by the need to articulate their methods and goals in term of other discourses. 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Reviewed by: The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis; and: Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature; and: Writing the Absence of the Father: Undoing Oedipal Structures in the Contemporary American Novel; and: The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious Daniel W. Ross Jeffrey Berman . The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis. New York: New York UP, 1985. 297 pp. $42.50. Katherine Dalsimer . Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. 141 pp. $16.95. Francesco Aristide Ancona . Writing the Absence of the Father: Undoing Oedipal Structures in the Contemporary American Novel. Lanham: UP of America, 1986. 154 pp. $23.50 cloth; pb. $11.50. David Punter . The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious. London: Routledge, 1985. 174 pp. $24.95. These are hectic times for psychoanalytic critics; it is virtually impossible to keep track of the flood of books appearing that use Freudian, neo-Freudian, Lacanian, or other psychoanalytic approaches to interpret literature. Indeed, psychoanalysis seems to have more staying power than any of the recently popular critical approaches. Currently, even the once revered Derrida and his deconstructive tactics are on the wane, and hardly anyone notices the differance. One of the best recent uses of psychoanalysis, Jeffrey Berman's The Talking Cure, seems bound to become a classic in the field. Berman deserves such credit; I have long thought his book on Conrad (Joseph Conrad: Writing as Rescue) is underappreciated. In The Talking Cure Berman examines the use modern writers have made of the psychoanalyst as a literary character. The judgments are generally astute, but it is the breadth of this book that impresses most. Berman covers nearly every major concept of psychoanalysis—narcissism, doubling, transference, and so on—and easily ranges through a host of post-Freudian revisionists such as Kohut, Kernberg, Mahler, and Jung. Indeed, when Berman testifies at one point that he reread all of Freud systematically to write this book, one can respond only as Don Meredith would: "It ain't braggin' if he done it." What makes this book especially valuable is the thoroughness with which Berman examines each writer's work. For example, his analysis of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar is greatly enhanced by his scrupulous reading of Plath's journals; similarly, Berman reads Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" with a close eye to her later feminist and economic tracts and to the published theories of her famous analyst, S. Weir Mitchell. Berman also recognizes that a superficial understanding of psychoanalysis underlies Doris Lessing's treatment of the subject as well as Fitzgerald's portrait of Dick Diver in Tender is the Night. In another chapter he carefully details the immensity of Nabokov's obsession with Freud, an obsession so overwhelming that Berman sees Freud as "Nabokov's alter ego, a hated part of the self that the novelist had to defeat again and again" (213). Not every chapter is superb. Berman seems, for example, strangely embarrassed about his criticism of Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a discussion enlivened by a comparison of the novelist's rendering of her experience to her analyst's superior published account of the case. But every chapter is thorough, often scintillating, and readable enough that critics who are not well versed in psychoanalytic method could use this book as a primer. For neophytes, I especially recommend the chapters on Gilman, Plath, Roth, and, most of all, the final chapter on D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel. Berman, in fact, reminds me of Thomas with his breadth of knowledge not only of Freud's writings but also of the impact Freud's ideas had on the interpretation of modern events. Berman has written a fascinating and far-reaching book; what a pity that [End Page 700] few will be able to afford it. Like The Talking Cure, Katharine Dalsimer's Female Adolescence contains a highly useful bibliography of psychoanalysis. But whereas Berman's book could win new converts to psychoanalytic criticism, Dalsimer's book surely will not. While reading the latter, I longed for some of Berman's breadth of reading and ease of style. In contrast, Dalsimer's prose seems carefully guarded and self...

ender politics is a crucial issue in contemporary American Jewish literature. One of the things that separates writers like E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth from earlier American Jewish writers is the growing pressure to renegotiate relations between the sexes. A historical opposition between feminism and Judaism presents Doctorow and Roth with problems insofar as they want to be both Jews and contemporary Americans. To become feminists may appear an exercise in assimilation; to resist feminism may appear to leave them in a patriarchal rut. For a long time, of course, there have been American Jewish women feminists, but the opposition between feminism and Judaism remains. As Elinor Lerner states, Until the revival of the feminist movement in the late 1960s the feminism of American Jewish women had been expressed in secular, rather than religious, terms (164). A new vision of what it means to be Jewish in America could result from the growing efforts-by women and men, theologians and secular writers-to reconcile feminism and Judaism, but the vision does not come easily. Emily Ellison and Jane B. Hill, in the introduction to their anthology Our Mutual Room: Modern Literary Portraits of the Opposite Sex, suggest that a sign of vitality in contemporary American is the wealth of cross-gender writing (v), in which the author enters the perspective of a character of the opposite sex. A similar route is proposed by Wendy Lesser in His Other Half: Men Looking at Women through Art. Talking about male artists whose work evokes the human figure and its surrounding world, Lesser claims that