American Idiom Research Articles

Reinventing the Wheel: Contextualizing Existing Innovations as a Path to Market Success

IntroductionOne of the truisms regarding innovation is that one should not try to “reinvent the wheel” or “discover how to do something that has already been discovered” (Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms, 2003). When business people fail to recognize the value of something “not invented here” or perhaps fail to recognize that an outside innovation exists at all, a great

The End of Jewish Radar: Snapshots of a Postethnic American Judaism by Martin S. Jaffee (review)

Reviewed by: The End of Jewish Radar: Snapshots of a Postethnic American Judaism by Martin S. Jaffee Julia Watts Belser (bio) The End of Jewish Radar: Snapshots of a Postethnic American Judaism, by Martin S. Jaffee. iUniverse, 2009. The End of Jewish Radar is an entertaining and thought-provoking collection of short essays, most of which first appeared as columns in JTNews: The Voice of Jewish Washington. Martin Jaffee aims to speak to “Jewishly-knowledgeable Jews with a sense of the absurd, a hunger for religious insight, and a checkered past,” while writing “in a Jewish idiom that respects an adult’s critical intelligence” (p. xii). At their best, Jaffee’s essays bring a perceptive historian’s eye to contemporary Jewish culture and retain a light touch that make them enjoyable and insightful reading. In “Groucho’s Paradox: On Joining the Club,” for example, Jaffee begins with a nod to Groucho Marx’s ability to translate the jokes of the shtetls of Eastern Europe into Midwestern American idiom, notes the unprecedented numbers of American gentiles entering the “very Jewish club that Groucho wouldn’t join” (p. 30), reads the contemporary moment in light of the dynamics of conversion to Judaism in late ancient Rome, and then proceeds to consider the implications for contemporary American Jewish culture. While this eclectic approach generally works, some essays have a tendency to meander between topics or to reference political events and local happenings that remind readers that they are, in fact, reading a collection of newspaper columns originally penned for the residents of an unfamiliar city. In the first section of the book, Jaffee aims to chronicle the changing face of American Judaism. Through brief anecdotes and wry humor, Jaffee offers glimpses of an American Judaism in which Eastern European Ashkenazic norms have been (somewhat) decentered by Asian ḥasidim and multi-racial Jewish families. While Jaffee is quick to emphasize that he is not a sociologist, his essays chart a significant social change within the contemporary Jewish American scene. Though he offers an important opportunity to engage with the realities of Jewish diversity today, his essays offer little critical engagement with the question of race and its complex history in Jewish culture, or with similar challenges leveled by Sephardic and Mizraḥi Jews against presumed Ashkenazic normativity. Instead, the particular gift of Jaffee’s prose lies in his trenchant reflections on his own experience navigating the increasing cultural [End Page 93] diversity of Jewish America. The opening essay offers an especially powerful assessment of the clash between the emerging reality of post-ethnic Judaism and the expectations of Jaffee’s own too-parochial “Jewish radar.” The second section, “Experiments in Popular Jewish Theology,” includes several excellent essays. “Amalek’s Season” includes a compelling assessment of the obligation to blot out the memory of Amalek—by erasing the presence of Amalek from within us, before we can point our fingers at him in the form of other human beings. “Who is Pious? Whoever Suspects Piety” offers a brilliant reading of Job and the idolatry of believing “that we have God in our pocket and that we can deploy Him to our purposes” (p. 59). However, I was disappointed with Jaffee’s dismissive caricature of contemporary neo-paganism in “Meagan the Pagan,” an essay which concludes on an especially problematic note of Jewish triumphalism. While Jaffee offers the powerful conclusion in the next essay that, “as a serious Jew, I believe that the Creator of All has programmed every human community to craft its own ways to honor and revere the source of our common being” (p. 78), in the previous pages, it seems he has missed an opportunity to put his theology into practice. The third section addresses Jewish religious and ethnic identity in America, including a spot-on column entitled “The Annual Christmas Whinefest.” Reflecting on the perils of the American holiday season, Jaffee suggests that we Jews are “besieged, not as in times past, by hostility and hatred, but by something even more threatening: the good-hearted assumption of our gentile friends and neighbors that we get some sort of nakhes from all this mishugas”—and observes how “the very attempt to...

Contemporary Bhakti Recastings

By exploring how many modern Indian poets (namely, here, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Dilip Chitre) have chosen to trace their affiliations and lineage back to the inclusive bhakti devotional tradition, I am exploring the fecund connections between practices of translation and creative writing in contemporary Indian poetry, but also the emergence of a modernity that results from the complex interplay of languages, lineages and hybrid transactions. These transactions between translation and creative writing, between English and other Indian languages, between folk music and poetry, between bhakti and Euro-American modernism, bhakti and the blues or the Beats (since the restaging of these medieval compositions is often made in a kind of jazzy, colloquial American idiom, confusing ‘western’ and ‘Indian’ categories), expose the simultaneous confluence of local and global literatures, the porosity of languages and traditions. Modernism and bhakti become paradigms for renewal and for emancipation. Indian poets also propose a form of belonging as a defiant all-inclusive category, an open-ended process of translation that subverts the quest for origins, transcends the national and celebrates deterritorialization. Translation becomes a form of transgressive practice with powerful dissident political and ‘heretical’ implications in the Indian context.

Making it New: Sappho, Mary Barnard and American Modernism

Contrary to the pessimism of American editors in the 1950s who told Mary Barnard that "Sappho would never sell," Barnard‘s Sappho: A New Translation (1958) is now in its fifty-fifth year of continuous print by the University of California Press. Expressing the bare, lyrical intensity of Sappho‘s poetry without recourse to excessive linguistic ornament or narrative padding, Barnard‘s translation is widely regarded as the best in modern idiom, with leading translation studies scholar Yopie Prins asserting that "Barnard‘s Sappho is often read as if it is Sappho." This essay will examine how Barnard managed this remarkable achievement, linking Sappho to the American modernist project to "make it new," to quote Ezra Pound. New archival material is used to show how Barnard declared herself "A Would-Be Sappho" as early as 1930. The essay begins with the reasons why Sappho was appealing to those with modernist sensibilities, reading the development of Imagists Pound, H.D. and Richard Aldington against the backdrop of the public excitement that surrounded the major excavations of Sappho‘s corpus at the turn of the century. The essay then zooms-in on the ways in which Sappho was a vital element in the formulation of Barnard‘s identity as a late modernist writer, particularly examining her appropriation of the imagery from Sappho‘s fragments as Barnard developed her "spare but musical" late Imagist style in her poems of the 1930s and 1940s. If Barnard‘s deep absorption of Sappho in her emergent years enabled her to find a means of producing American free verse in the modernist tradition, then there was an intriguing reciprocation: it was this very "Sapphic modernism," I contend, that enabled Barnard to find a means of translating Sappho to be read "as if it is Sappho." The essay concludes with a new interpretation of the significance of Barnard‘s appropriation of Sappho in her own poetry, noting how, peculiarly, Barnard drew out of her Sappho connection a thoroughly American idiom to pit against European literary autonomy, on a par with William Carlos Williams‘s own attempts to produce a thoroughly American verse. In making Sappho new for modern Americans, Barnard was, I find, making a new language for modern American poetry.

Randall Jarrell—Only a Reader

Randall Jarrell—Only a Reader David Heddendorf (bio) It's a good idea, when reading Randall Jarrell's criticism, to find a quiet empty room. If someone else must be present, make it a loving patient companion who won't mind being interrupted every five minutes when you read aloud sentences like these: "The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks." "If Miss Glasgow were aroused in the middle of the night by a burglar, who clapped a pistol to her head and demanded, 'Name me a philosopher!' you can be certain it would not be Hume." "These seem easily different from anybody else's poems, but hardly distinguishable from one another; their language, tone, and mechanism of effect have a relishingly idiosyncratic and monotonous regularity, as if they were the diary some impressionable but unimpassioned monomaniac had year by year been engraving on the side of a knitting-needle." Reviewing a selection of Jarrell's essays for the New Yorker in 1999, Adam Gopnik writes that "Jarrell's real subject . . . was the American idiom, and it's the tone he refined from that idiom which will inspire you after his subjects are forgotten." This forgetting, however, is the problem with reading Randall Jarrell. We delight in his wit and his original voice, which continue to set a lofty bar for reviewers; but who remembers or has even heard of the luckless poets he so brilliantly skewers? The style somersaults and soars above a world of letters that has long since disappeared. A similar datedness pervades Jarrell's social criticism. He can sound startlingly prescient, as in A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962): "Most of the information people have in common is something that four or five years from now they will not even remember having known." But we have our own critics of an information age that has exploded beyond anything Jarrell imagined, just as we have more recent critics of American waste and consumerism in writers such as Wendell Berry and Christopher Lasch. For all his impassioned energy—he was usually right—Jarrell's essays on anti-intellectualism, schools, and mass media speak to a blither, cockier America of the 1950s and early 60s. Jarrell excels, his contemporaries agree, when—forsaking one-liners and cultural generalizations—he devotes himself to praise. His appreciations of Frost, Auden, Stevens, and Bishop might seem conventional today, but that's because we live in a critical climate that Jarrell helped inform. "Perhaps," writes an admiring rueful Brad Leithauser, "he suffers from having been so often right." When Jarrell extols less widely acclaimed authors like Christina Stead and Rudyard Kipling, his enthusiasm is no less infectious. Countless readers have tracked down Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, [End Page 242] prompted solely by Jarrell's leisurely, meditative, and widely reprinted preface. Writing "Some Lines from Whitman" in Poetry and the Age (1953), his most influential collection, Jarrell says, "To show Whitman for what he is one does not need to praise or explain or argue, one needs simply to quote." And so he does, for pages on end, choosing essential passages we all remember and out-of-the-way ones we've probably forgotten, pausing only to remind us, with some inspired vignette, that we're reading Randall Jarrell: "They might have put on his tombstone Walt Whitman: He Had His Nerve." After one long quotation he exclaims that "these lines are so good that even admiration feels like insolence, and one is ashamed of anything that one can find to say about them. How anyone can dismiss or accept patronizingly the man who wrote them, I do not understand." It's important to recall that many of Jarrell's contemporary readers did dismiss Whitman, or accept him patronizingly, which is why "Some Lines from Whitman" became a famous essay. But today's readers, used to a more methodical, often combative critical writing, might resent Jarrell's breezy assumptions and indignant protests, preferring to have the bard's virtues spelled out and anatomized. Even Leithauser calls Jarrell's "vice" of spurning explanation "simultaneously vexing and endearing." If Jarrell, intending to praise, sometimes left...

The Ever-Changing Nature of the Sea: Whitman's Absorption of Maximilian Schele de Vere

In recent yearS, Betty Barrett and Ted Genoways have discovered that Whitman lifted entire images and phrases from newspaper articles and rearranged them into some of his Civil War poems.1 This aspect of Whitman's poetry is not, however, confined to the Whitman of the Civil War era. Instead it began earlier and stemmed from a long-lasting fascination with a fellow writer whose influence on Leaves of Grass remains largely overlooked: Maximilian Schele De Vere, author of Stray Leaves from the Book of Nature,2 which appeared 1855, sharing with Whitman's first edition of Leaves not only a publication date but a green cover blind-stamped with flower y orna- ments and sporting a golden title. Stray Leaves has so far found its way into Whitman scholarship as nothing more than a curious footnote,3 though Schele De Vere himself has been increasingly gaining critical notice.But even though it is unlikely that this book influenced the 1855 Leaves of Grass (Stray Leaves would have been published at most only a few months before the first edition of Leaves of Grass) and the striking physical similarities between the books do appear to be coincidental, such is not the case with the 1856 and (especially) the 1860 editions of Leaves, which are significantly influenced by Schele De Vere's thinking, and which include an almost word-by-word copy of a whole paragraph from Stray Leaves-the first known instance of W hitman copying and rearranging somebody else's words into his own poetry.Born in a grim old mountain castle4 Sweden and raised Prussia, baron Maximilian Schele De Vere (1820-1898) emigrated to the United States his early twenties after receiving a degree philosophy from Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm Universitat. In 1844, he became the youngest faculty member the histor y of the University of Virginia, where he taught a variety of subjects and even volunteered as a drill sergeant during the Civil War. He published several books on natural science, comparative literature, American histor y, and linguistics, and he translated French and German works of fiction into English. While Schele De Vere's upbringing, education, and social status could not have been more different from Whitman's, their philosophical interests overlapped on a striking number of topics. Both shared a keen interest the American idiom (Schele de Vere was the first academic to teach classes on it), were fascinated by Eastern mythology,5 admired Darwin, Humboldt, and the heroes of the American Revolution, and tried to fuse a strict belief natural law with spirituality.6 (See Figure 1.)Whitman presumably discovered the scholar first through Outlines of Comparative Philology, a book Schele De Vere published through G. P. Putnam & Co. 1853. According to C. Carroll Hollis, Whitman borrowed the book from his acquaintance William Swinton sometime between 1856 and 18597 and took notes on it.8 In the only academic treatment of Schele De Vere and Whitman to date, James Perrin Warren identifies striking similarities both authors' optimistic understanding of language9 and strongly suggests that Whitman studied Schele De Vere's book. Whether Whitman came upon Schele De Vere's later writ- ings, such as Stray Leaves, by actively searching for them or through a chance encounter remains uncertain. Considering that Whitman most likely read the periodicals Schele De Vere published on a regular ba- sis, it seems almost inevitable that the well-read Whitman would have rediscovered the well-published Swede at some point.One very likely place for Whitman to have re-encountered Schele De Vere is Putnam's Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art, a periodical issued by G. P. Putnam, the publisher of both Swin- ton's and Schele De Vere's books. The poet would have read Swinton's Rambles over the Realms of Verbs and Substantives10 published two parts the periodical late 1854, as well as a review of Leaves 1855- one of the few that, besides his self-reviews, had anything positive to say about his book. …

Biographer Explores Character, Pathology, and Achievement

Biographer Explores Character, Pathology, and Achievement

Snapshots of a Shakespearean in China

I. An Invitation My father, who is old, These were Shalang's--Sharon in its English form--words just before she left my office in the fall 1985, at the end a charming conversation set up by a colleague who had sent her exchange student in linguistics to pass an hour with me. Sharon was a slender woman, with long dark hair framing her oval face. She had a quick mind, was already well-versed in American idioms, and after nine months study in Florida missed her husband and child very much. My father, who is old, Shakespeare:' For the next few days the curious statement remained with me. With the eternal present tense Chinese grammar, for me it was a complex, albeit brief text enfolding a mystery. What to make the deceptively simple likes; the adjective a sign the daughter's reverence; most all, the curious link between the father and the playwright, as if they were twin members an equation. We had not talked about her father, nor about Shakespeare, though surely she knew I was a Shakespearean, a title that, to me, always sounds so pretentious, so odd. In English departments one can be an eighteenth-century scholar, or someone whose field is critical theory, or the medieval period. But only those foolhardy enough to take that exhilarating voyage into the cosmos the playwright arc stereotyped by the name their study and idolatry--Shakespearean. Three days later, giving way to impulse, I packed up two large boxes books on Shakespeare, books I had read and reread since graduate school days and no longer needed, and mailed them to the old man in Changchun City who I relished the idea these well-worn old friends traveling to the other side the world, a chronicle my graduate student years, through my first teaching position at Illinois, then Boston University, and to the present, a full professor at Florida who has himself written books about the playwright. There, they would be received and--better yet--read and cherished by an old man who likes Shakespeare. And that was that, or so I thought, until a month later she paid a second visit to my office, bearing presents from her father--a silk scarf for my wife Norma, a fan for me, two plastic rulers decorated with a Chinese facsimile the Emperor's Palace for our boys, then ages two and four. At the end our conversation, as I walked her to the door, she asked, Homan, would you like to visit the People's Republic China? I took the question as an instance social etiquette, a polite closure to a good hour, the equivalent to our suggesting, as we say good-bye, Hey, if you're ever in our neck the woods, drop in for a drink--okay? I would learn later that there is no such shallow invitation in Chinese culture. I would also learn that their custom is often to place the most important object or issue a conversation last, as Shalang had done earlier with that reference to her father. A short time later, we received an official invitation from Beijing for the family to spend a summer in Changchun City, where I was asked to direct the resident company, the Changchun Modern Drama Players, in a production of any one Shakespeare's and to teach a course in Shakespeare and the modern playwrights at Jilin University. Zhang Siyang was one the most eminent Shakespeareans in China, yet out modesty his daughter had not mentioned that in our two conversations. As President Deng's way apologizing for the cruel treatment accorded university intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Siyang was offered the seat honor next to Deng during his inauguration in the People's Palace, located diagonally across Tiananmen Square from the mausoleum where the Chairman is buried. This old man who Shakespeare would be our host. I accepted at once. II. A Choice Shakespeares The Chinese company asked which Shakespeare's plays I wished to direct, and, wanting to meet them halfway, I suggested they pick the play, or at least make a list from which I could choose. …

The Political Resonance of <i>Nixon in China</i>

ABSTRACT Contemporary hopes for China’s peaceful rise, the continuing global reverberations of the end of the Cold War, and, most importantly for an opera crafted in a distinctly American musical idiom, profound questions concerning the systemic power and role of the United States – all help Nixon in China draw an expanding audience. That the opera has entered the canon is partly because the complexity of Nixon’s character suggests the insecurity of global political leadership in our own day. Understanding the context within which it was first created may be useful, but the opera’s broader themes resonate more deeply with the human experience in a rapidly changing world.

Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right. By Benjamin Balint. (New York: Public Affairs, 2010. xii, 290 pp. $26.95, ISBN 978-1-58648-749-2.)

Until now, the absence of a history of Commentary, the flagship magazine of neoconservatism, has been a major gap in the historiographies of the modern American Right and American Judaism. Benjamin Balint's Running Commentary fills this hole and does so admirably. Writing a history of Commentary is not an easy task. Because the story of the magazine is central to the history of the postwar New York intellectual community, many of its episodes and anecdotes have been covered in such books as Alexander Bloom's Prodigal Sons (1986), Nathan Abrams's Commentary Magazine (2007), and several memoirs by Commentary's longtime editor Norman Podhoretz. Balint's challenge is not only to avoid retelling old stories but also to find new insights and refresh a familiar tale. Balint, a former assistant editor at Commentary, succeeds because instead of concentrating on Commentary's political history, as most authors have, he reminds us of the magazine's impact on American literature and Jewish life. Readers who today know Commentary primarily for its politics may be surprised to learn that from its founding in 1945, it published high-quality fiction and literary criticism—including the early work of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth—and was home to critics such as Alfred Kazin. Balint credits Commentary with providing them a platform to explore the Jewish experience in the United States and thereby doing much to bring Jewish writers into the mainstream of American literature. Similarly, Balint notes that before Commentary, the state of American Jewish theological writing was poor, but by publishing Emil Fackenheim, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Will Herberg, and other prominent postwar theologians, the magazine provided a space for sophisticated theological discussion and did much to define modern American Judaism. Commentary, Balint concludes, “reshap[ed] Jewish culture into a distinctively American idiom” and changed how American “Jews spoke about things Jewish and general” (p. 210).

"Blue Under-Shirts Upon a Line": Orrick Johns and the Genesis of William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Using William Carlos Williams's and Orrick Johns's early working association as members of the "Others" group as a starting point, the essay examines how Johns's now largely forgotten poem, "Blue Under-Shirts," possibly influenced the composition of Williams's iconic "The Red Wheelbarrow." The similarities between these two poems are striking, and I argue that Williams may very well have had the shortcomings of Johns's poem in mind when he composed "The Red Wheelbarrow." The essay proposes that what Williams likely recognized in his friend Johns' poem was the framework for a new modern American poetic line, demonstrated by his own one-sentence poem, that moves beyond the imagist principle of austere, objective description to a new focus on the distinctive linguistic features of the American idiom, an approach that draws the reader in as an active participant in the creation of the poetic experience.

Gordon Stretton

A Liverpudlian of mixed Jamaican and Irish ancestry, William Masters, born in 1887, provides a fascinating study of a member of the African diaspora seeking and finding an artistic identity. After membership of a Lancashire clog-dancing troupe, he adopted a stage name, Gordon Stretton, in tribute to an Edwardian music-hall artist, then learnt to be a jazz drummer under the tutelage of visiting African-American musician Billy Dorsey. Stretton’s varied career subsequently took him to France and Argentina. He exemplifies the manner in which members of the African diaspora of very varied backgrounds were sucked into currently prestigious North American idioms.

Charles Johnson in Context

Reviewed by: Charles Johnson in Context Marc C. Conner (bio) Selzer, Linda Furgerson . Charles Johnson in Context. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2009. The scholarly work produced on the novelist, short-story writer, philosopher, and cultural theorist Charles Johnson has become increasingly sophisticated and penetrating in the past decade. The first book-length study of Johnson's work, Jonathan Little's Charles Johnson's Spiritual Imagination (1997), set forth several fundamental readings of and approaches to Johnson; then Will Nash's astute Charles Johnson's Fiction (2003) studied Johnson's political and literary influences in keen detail; Gary Storhoff's Understanding Charles Johnson (2004) delved deeply into the Buddhist elements in Johnson's work; Rudolph Byrd's Charles Johnson's Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest (2005) explored Johnson's work as offering heteroglossic readings of American culture; and finally Marc Conner and Will Nash's edited volume, Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher(2007), brought together a number of scholars in assessing Johnson's work from the multiple perspectives of philosophy, Johnson's original discipline. Over this ten-year span, the general terrain of Johnson scholarship has been marked, and the main issues and concepts have been pursued to some degree of completion. The time has come for studies of Johnson that build upon these fine works and pursue Johnson's writings further, examining Johnson in combination with other late-twentieth-century American writers, or in conversation with his historical time and place, or focusing on his development of particular ideas and concepts. Linda Selzer has accomplished precisely this in her superb study, Charles Johnson in Context. Moving from the work that has come before her (and to which she herself contributed), Selzer explores Johnson's writing from within three major intellectual contexts, producing an interpretation of Johnson's work and importance that is impressive in its depth and intellectual power. Selzer engages Johnson through three major lenses of interpretation, focusing on the contexts of black philosophers, black Buddhists, and the "new" black intellectuals. By bringing these crucial contexts into relief, Selzer is able to tie Johnson's artistic achievements to the larger projects of those working to reform the practice of American academic philosophy in the [End Page 569] post-World War II era, those seeking to translate an ancient religious practice into an African American idiom, and those attempting to redefine cosmopolitan thought in order to make it a more effective tool for social justice. Johnson's participation in all three of these endeavors deepens the historical import, social consequence, and conceptual depth of his art. (2) Selzer's ambitious intellectual approach accomplishes a double aim, both increasing our understanding of the influence on Johnson of these contexts, and at the same time showing how "Johnson's characteristic fusion of literature, Buddhism, and philosophy . . . vigorously participates in, advances, and helps to define larger directions in American intellectual life" (2). The result is a series of strong readings of Johnson's fiction, which further illuminate Johnson's own time and intellectual history. Selzer examines Johnson's own biography as a young black philosophy student in the late 1960s and as part of a larger movement in which black intellectuals moved increasingly into both the public sphere and the academic profession as philosophers. Such figures as Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stephen Carter, Johnson, and several others have revised American cosmopolitan thought. Selzer reads Johnson's National Book Award-winning novel, Middle Passage (1990), against the background of a rise of black intellectuals who opposed the increasing specialization and narrowness of traditional academia in favor of "organic" intellectual work and the effort "to articulate a cosmopolitanism that maintains an interplay between universals and particulars" (162, 167). Such efforts harmonize with much of Johnson's thought and work: "Johnson frequently enunciates a position that resonates with attempts to articulate a cosmopolitanism that reclaims the normative force of the universal while recognizing multiple, overlapping allegiances" (169). Selzer acknowledges how Middle Passage's setting—a raucous slave-ship crossing the Atlantic in the 1830s—hardly seems propitious to cosmopolitan thought; yet she illustrates the ways in which Johnson infuses this setting with complex intellectual figures of diverse backgrounds who articulate a range...

Three Collections of Welty Criticism: A Review

Three Collections of Welty Criticism: A Review Michael Kreyling A Still Moment: Essays on the Art of Eudora Welty. Ed. John F. Desmond. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1978. i–viii, 1–142. Eudora Welty: A Form of Thanks. Ed. Louis Dollarhide and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1979. 3–138. Eudora Welty: Critical Essays. Ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1979. 3–446. Eudora Welty’s seventieth year has been a rich one in published assessments of her work. For more than forty years Welty has been publishing fiction and criticism; for nearly that long reviewers and critics have been interpreting and judging her work. The three collections listed above indicate a major stage in the course of Welty criticism. Essays published therein confirm the viability of previous judgments and refine others. A few strike new paths. In the end, happily, Welty’s unique and elusive art rises intact from the smoke of literary criticism. I will deal with the books in the order of their publication, leaving the lion’s share of attention for the Prenshaw volume. A Still Moment is a feeble contribution to Welty criticism, although a few individual essays in it are fine. The better essays are reprinted from sources (Virginia Quarterly Review and RANAM) that are at least as accessible as this volume itself. J. A. Allen’s “Eudora Welty: The Three Moments” deserves more exposure, even though it was more handsomely printed in VQR. Allen has made very few changes in the reprinted version. M. E. Bradford’s review of Losing Battles, reprinted from RANAM for 1971, is still a review. Its first appearance was significant, for it struck a balance among readers who were mistakenly taking sides on Julia Mortimer and Losing Battles in general. Bradford had not expanded the review enough; more is still left for further study than is actually stated. Douglas Messerli’s essay on the “encounter between myth and history” in The Golden Apples uses some fresh language to discuss what has probably been Welty’s most consistently criticized book; his discussion is a justifiable addition to the many myth-tracing studies of it. Albert J. Griffith’s essay on Welty’s “poetics of prose” [End Page 221] is excellent; he ranges over the breadth of her critical writings (before The Eye of the Story appeared) and convinces us that her status as a critic has been underrated. Not much of merit can be said of the other six essays in the Desmond collection. Some repeat previous critical statements and add little that is original. Some are confused and confusing. Desmond’s own contribution is a case in point. He collects the imagery of The Optimist’s Daughter into categories that eventually overlap, clouding his point. And he fails to credit others whose earlier responses to this novel relate to his own and would have helped him to concentrate his essay. A Still Moment contains too many essays that are in themselves poorly conceived and executed and that often fail to allow for previously published work. Eudora Welty: A Form of Thanks is one of the finer examples of its type: the published proceedings of a symposium. It possesses a varied nature and contains some important essays not to be found elsewhere. Cleanth Brooks’s paper, which opened the University of Mississippi meeting in November 1977, moves from his discovery of an 1869 text of the Bible in a Sussex dialect that resembles the Southern American idiom to a major point: the American Southern idiom (by extension the folk culture of the South) is not a corruption of the standard in language and culture, but a vital surviving link with an older tradition. Brooks sees two dangers to that tradition at the heart of The Optimist’s Daughter. His patient progress from old Sussex text to a fresh view of Welty’s most recent novel should be an example to all of us: the best literary critics are those whose equipment is a rich and enthusiastic life, full of reading and experience kept whole, not segregated from “the real world.” Peggy Prenshaw’s essay is a careful evaluation of the women in Welty’s fiction. Prenshaw...

La distanciation dans l’œuvre régionaliste de Grant Wood comme moyen de mise en échec du nationalisme

Regionalist painter Grant Wood’s works complied with much of the regionalist ideology as defined by critic Thomas Craven with its nationalism and its rejection of European Modernism. Wood displayed his concern for an American idiom in many of his works. However, while they use pictorial elements that suggest acceptance of the nationalist rhetoric of both Craven and the New Deal art projects, Wood’s works actually show aesthetic preoccupations similar to those of Modernists, and a growing distance from the mythic representations of America often found in regionalist art. While Wood empathises with his countrymen, he also introduces elements within the narrative, and aesthetic elements, that contradict his acceptance of the dominant discourse. Strange, inappropriate and unexpected incursions question the theme and aesthetic affiliation of a work. This deviation, this escape from the frame imposed by Craven and the New Deal, this estrangement, can work as a questioning of America, its values, its myths and its self-representation.

Structural Surprise in the Triadic-Line Poems

William Carlos Williams insisted his triadic-line derives from some evanescent quality of the spoken language and more specifically from the characteristics of American speech.1 This essay will focus on how recent advances in an area of linguistics known as international phonology have helped to vindicate these adamant but impressionistic claims. These advances center on the description of the intonational phrase, a well-defined unit of spoken language quite nearly satisfies Williams's discussions of the variable foot, especially as defined in his verse entry in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.2 A brief overview of the intonational phrase suggests how it may satisfy the desiderata Williams articulates for his measure: 1. The intonational phrase is a domain in language; is, it is a recognizable unit participates in the organization of language and it specifically factors in the organization of spoken language (i.e., unlike meter, it is not inherent to individual words or written language but exists only across sequences of word in use) (Nespor and Vogel 188; Hayes 219). 2. The intonational phrase is the first domain is variable (Nespor and Vogel 1 87-203), meaning the amount of language comprising an intonational phrase - unlike the amount of language constituting a metrical foot - varies greatly depending on a number of linguistic and paralinguistic factors (lnkelas). This variability and its underlying causes are quite close to Williams's discussion of the variable foot as a prosodie pattern [that] is evaluated by criteria of effectiveness and expressiveness rather than mechanical syllable counts (Williams Free Verse 289; SL 326). 4. As the domain at which intonation is assigned, the intonational phrase is responsible for the audible chunks or tunes embody our perception of the significance of our own (Tench 7). The genius of the triadic-line then is it derives its music from the inherent musicality of our and not from the limited rhythms associated with a meter. Or, as Allen Ginsberg called it, what Williams puts down on the page are the squiggly tunes of speech (1 65). 5. Each intonational phrase is defined by a tonic syllable, whose audible intensification (it is distinguished phonologically from other syllables by a combination of factors, involving pitch, volume, and length [Tench 53-55]) is naturally perceived as a beat. Intonational phrases also tend to occur where structural pauses can be inserted within (Nespor and Vogel 1 88). These two tendencies help explain engrained habits of describing triadic-line as well as free in terms of beats or breath units. 6. Finally, linguistic scholarship has substantiated American and British English have distinct intonational contours, thus corroborating Williams's insistence the two are not the same language. Furthermore, specific proof the intonation of American English is fairly monotonous and level helps explicate why his late lacks the irruptive, dynamic feel of the early poems, as it intuitively mimics the shape of a neutral statement in the American idiom (Mencken 322-23; Flexner and Soukhanov 118-19). Let's say we accept these five points. The questions still remain: how to sync up the intonational phrase and the triadic line and what practical benefit this correlation may be in discerning the measure's significance to later poets? This utility may be suggested by listening to Williams reading an excerpt from To Daphne and Virginia, which was recorded in 1955 at UC Santa Barbara. At the start of this reading, Williams propounds his notion of the variable foot; he then reads the beginning of this poem three times, as if to illustrate his points, concluding that is not an iambic pentameter:3 While it is difficult to discern differences between these three readings, the level of excitement seems to vary - is, where the first reading is more level or neutral, particularly in the second complete triadic line, the second reading is more expressive. …

The Last Page

THE LAST PAGE H Is INVOLVEMENT with Dissent was, so to speak, one of Norman Mailer's more improbable marriages , and by no means the shortest. A member of the founding editorial board, he was on this journal's masthead for most of four decades. The first half-dozen years or so were the honeymoon phase—a time when Mailer published a number of essays and short items blending antiStalinist Marxism with his own existentialist intuitions. By the mid-1960s, the couple would still be seen in public together, on occasion; but the relationship had cooled into a formality. Irving Howe's landmark essay on "The New York Intellectuals " in 1968 identified Mailer's psychopolitical musings as an important source for countercultural sensibility and New Left sloganeering . (Mailer's "The White Negro," appearing in the Summer 1957 issue, managed to imitate the Fanonian theory of therapeutic violence even before Fanon had written The Wretched of the Earth.) Nor would readers have failed to pick up the allusion when Howe remarked that the adjective "existential" had enjoyed its vogue mainly by communicating "the sensation of depth without the burden of content." And yet Mailer was listed as a contributing editor up through the Spring 1991 issue. His departure generated no public comment, it seems, and was in any case a matter of space rather than of ideological conflict. New names were being added to the masthead, and nobody could remember the last time Mailer had attended an editorial meeting; so all bonds were dissolved, sans drama. But to revisit those early issues is a reminder of how ardent the connection once was. Indeed, it even predated the creation of Dissent itself. "For years," wrote Mailer in an essay called, "What I Think of Artistic Freedom" (Spring 1955), "I have been alternately attracted to Marxism and Anarchism, and in the tension between the two I suppose I have found the themes for my novels." The effort to synthe1 2 8 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 size them had been unmistakable in Mailer's rather hallucinatory second book, Barbary Shore (1951), a sort of hybrid of Arthur Koestler and Franz Kafka. One of the characters delivers long, quasi-Trotskyist statements analyzing the violent conflict and convergence between Soviet and American forms of "state capitalism." Those speeches must have given Dissent's editors-to-be déjà vu. Mailer's novelistic pamphleteering was at points almost indistinguishable from the ideas of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, which Howe and Lewis Coser had encountered in the mid-1940s. The Johnsonites , led by the West Indian historian and theorist C.L.R. James, were an oppositional faction within the Workers Party—and Howe, in particular, had crossed polemical swords with them in internal debates. The echoes of those arguments in Barbary Shore were no coincidence : Mailer's French translator and sometime tutor in Marxist theory was Jean Malaquais, a close friend of James. Reviewing Barbary Shore for the Nation in 1951, Howe judged it a bad novel, though a brave one, given the cold war climate. He sounded no more enamored of Mailer's fictive gauchisme than he had been about its Johnsonite prototype. But they were, after all, speaking a common Mandan language. Barely a year later , both Howe and Mailer participated in the Partisan Review symposium "Our Country and Our Culture"—finding themselves among the handful of contributors disinclined to think that American intellectuals never had it so good. The aftermath, of course, was complex— with Dissent shedding the bolshevisant manner for an American idiom, even as Mailer transformed himself into a vanguard party of one (also a very American thing to do). Well, so it goes. It's the old story. You meet in circumstances that look, with hindsight, like fate and you create together a little socialism of shared meaning, for as long as it may last. Arguments? Misunderstandings? They are part of it. The world is a wedding. SCOTT MCLEMEE ...

The Verse Line in Williams

1. IN THE 1959 INTERVIEWS WITH EDITH HEAL, William Carlos Williams talks of his Complete Collected Poems in 1938 as providing him with whole picture, chance appraise all he gone through technically learn about the making of Then he recounts learning organize poem into lines: greatest problem was that I didn't know how divide poem into what perhaps my lyrical sense wanted. Free verse was not the answer. From the beginning I knew that the American must shape the pattern; later I rejected the word and spoke of the American idiom--this was better word than language, less academic, more identified with speech. (I Wanted 64-65) This kind of statement draws skeptical comments from critics (for example, Cushman 81-83, 99, and Perloff 160). In point of fact, Williams spoke the problem of lineation in letter James Laughlin in 1939. When Laughlin related how his professors at Harvard had told the young editor not mix and visual standards in poetry, Williams was contemptuous. What they, the formulators of that particular question do not know, Williams snapped, that an quality, NEW quality, underlies and determines the visual which they object to (Williams and Laughlin 49). Williams had argued for this throughout the 1930s and proposed formalize it--what he refers above as pattern in verse line. The verse is time; he insisted in 1931, time manifest in and measured by this line. Not forced, metric time but something invented, a time that catches thought as it lags and swings up into the attention (Selected Letters 136). That verse line, the basis of poetic form, was be discovered in--invented from--the American vernacular. (1) Williams's attempts at measuring the vernacular line have largely been dismissed; the sound and shape of his poems remain topic of contention. (2) No doubt visual and aural elements are both at play, and any discussion of Williams's verse line needs consider their interlinking complexities. issue here is twofold. First, if what guides Williams is primarily an auditory quality found in American speech, then exactly in what way are his lines modeled on speech? Second, and more difficult establish, if Williams's prosody is speech-based, how might those lines express, as he insisted, musical time and so be the basis of what he notoriously called new measure? In the following I'll argue that Williams's verse line functions as prosodic device, indicative of several aural factors, chiefly intonation, pace, and rhythm, and that it is fashioned with regard its impact on the total poem--that is, subordinate the poem as whole--rather than functioning simply as visual or rhythmic unit (such as an iambic pentameter line). (3) Further, I'll demonstrate in what ways Williams's prosody is in fact speech-based and show, by listening Williams, how line breaks give clear evidence of his prosodic practice--breaks best explained by use of syntax, intonation, and pace. 2. In December 1931, Williams composed letter Kay Boyle, intended as the opening declaration for incarnation of Contact (Mariani 328-29). His premise was, bluntly, There is no workable poetic extant among us today (Selected Letters 129). He writes of listening speech in my own environment for prosodic model which he'd develop into form. The of poetry, he insists, that of language (4) Because the of poetry is be found in characteristics of the spoken language, Williams will consequently search the vernacular for formal characteristics and argue that Greek prosody emerges from the Greek and English prosody from English. It follows that, because American is distinct from British speech--shaped by relationship place, an argument central In the American Grain (1925) (5)--American poetry should be distinguished by its development from vernacular, hence his later insistence on intrinsic form (Collected II, 54). …

‘The entire panorama of what America is to me’: Dylan and the American idiom

AbstractThis article discusses the Americanness' of Dylan's ‘American idiom’ in the context of Dylan's profoundly international cultural influence. Dylan is placed in a recognisable US tradition of the American artist who is interested in ‘self-invention’ and ‘self-architecturing’ almost as strongly as he is in distinctive reworkings of received cultural traditions. Dylan's interest in the American vernacular, in moving across art forms (from poetry to cinema to music to writing), his ongoing acts of self-invention and pioneer-like reinvention (Emerson, Gatsby) are explored in relation to Scorsese's documentary and the interpretations of that film (and Dylan's stature) offered by Greil Marcus and Don DeLillo. The article connects Dylan to a range of US and international (French, Australian) literary texts (prose, poems) in order to explore the resonances of Dylan's Americanist thematics beyond the US so that throughout the globe, Dylan's invocations of modes of reinvention strike chords everywhere.

‘The entire panorama of what America is to me’: Dylan and the American idiom

This article discusses the Americanness' of Dylan's ‘American idiom’ in the context of Dylan's profoundly international cultural influence. Dylan is placed in a recognisable US tradition of the American artist who is interested in ‘self-invention’ and ‘self-architecturing’ almost as strongly as he is in distinctive reworkings of received cultural traditions. Dylan's interest in the American vernacular, in moving across art forms (from poetry to cinema to music to writing), his ongoing acts of self-invention and pioneer-like reinvention (Emerson, Gatsby) are explored in relation to Scorsese's documentary and the interpretations of that film (and Dylan's stature) offered by Greil Marcus and Don DeLillo. The article connects Dylan to a range of US and international (French, Australian) literary texts (prose, poems) in order to explore the resonances of Dylan's Americanist thematics beyond the US so that throughout the globe, Dylan's invocations of modes of reinvention strike chords everywhere.