American Literary Canon Research Articles

Re-mediating The Female American: Collaboration and Situated Knowledges in the Digital Humanities Classroom

ABSTRACT The Female American, published pseudonymously in 1767, has drawn scholarly attention in recent decades as a novel that raises questions about anonymity, gender, authorship, Indigeneity, settler colonialism, and the American literary canon. Yet access to the text has remained limited, dependent on subscription databases and print scholarly editions. In 2022, as part of a graduate seminar on eighteenth-century literature, science, and colonialism, we produced the first open-access digital edition of volume 1; a subset of the class also recorded a public domain audiobook of the full novel. This article presents an account of our process and the connections drawn between these projects and course content, with attention to conversations and tensions that arose as we drafted a land acknowledgment for the edition. Moving beyond the “how we built this” genre common in digital humanities, this article offers a critical reflection on the ways our individual interests, identities, commitments, and institutional embeddedness shaped the knowledge we could cocreate. Our aim is to demonstrate that the benefits of digital pedagogy extend far beyond technical skill-building—especially in graduate education, where digital projects provide an opportunity for emerging scholars to reflect critically on material and social entanglements that conventional humanities workflows often obscure.

Erasing the Pink on the World Atlas: Re-Mapping African American Literature

This article aims at analyzing Henry Louis Gates’ theoretical strategies for remapping the African American literary space within the context of both American literature and world literary system. Gates’ strategies can be delineated through four stages. Firstly, he excavates a vast array of African American literary texts. In the second stage, he traces the lineage of African American literary theory to its origins within the African interpretation system. During the third stage, he employs African American literary theory to curate the African American literary canon. In the fourth and final stage, within the realm of African American literature, Gates endeavors to rebalance the representation of female and male voices within the literary space. A pivotal aspect of Gates’ strategies lies in his willingness to embrace and celebrate the African legacy, setting him apart from other marginalized nations and minority groups who may tend to disregard or belittle their own heritage. Building upon this distinctive characteristic, this article posits that Gates’ approach holds the potential to assist marginalized nations and minority groups in several ways: 1) Re-mapping literary space: Gates’ strategies can guide these groups in redefining their literary space within the broader contexts of both national and global literature systems. 2) Claiming literary legacy: emulating Gates, these groups can be inspired to embrace and champion their own literary heritage, instead of diminishing its significance. 3) Fostering indigenous literary models: by adopting Gates’ model, writers from these communities can craft their literary space grounded in their native or national paradigms, as opposed to adhering solely to Western European or U.S. models. 4) Balancing literary representation: Gates’ strategies also facilitate the recalibration of the literary landscape within these nations or groups by accommodating diverse elements such as race, gender, and class, thereby achieving a more inclusive and balanced representation. Overall, Gates’ methodology offers a powerful framework for marginalized communities to assert their literary identities, reshape their narratives, remap their literary spaces, and promote diversity within their literary landscapes.

Finite Jest: Irony and Healing in There There

Abstract: Critical responses to Tommy Orange's There There have largely focused on its relationship to other Native American works published over the last few decades. However, a juxtaposition of the novel with an Anglo-American counterpart, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , can prove particularly illuminating for exploring Orange's distinctiveness, along with the contemporary status of two fundamental concepts—irony and healing—in the broader Native American literary canon. For Orange, the wellspring of restorative belief can be found in an attenuated but still potent and promising form of a traditional Indigenous worldview—namely, an ideal of personal autonomy framed by the divine and emphasizing the self's subordination to and emancipation within a vivifying network of interdependent presences, both human and nonhuman. There There diagnoses pathologies afflicting contemporary Native communities with a keenly ironic eye, but it preserves, against corrosive skepticism, a robust confidence in possibilities for personal and collective recovery. What we ultimately discover in juxtaposing this work with Infinite Jest is a dramatic contrast between one tradition's lingering morbidity in the contemporary moment, and another's enduring vitality.

The Blackout in Stepford and the Shadow of Southern Horror

Abstract: In this essay, I reconsider Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Step-ford Wives and place it in dialogue with its filmic adaptations, to reflect on how much the films based on Levin’s novel foreclose and marginalize black representation and embodiment that had been centered in the novel. I argue that shifts from the novel The Step-ford Wives to the first film, released in 1975 and directed by Bryan Forbes, erase the black female subjectivity that centrally shapes the novel. Similarly, by implication in the 2004 film The Stepford Wives directed by Frank Oz, blackness is associated with a decaying urban landscape and scapegoated as the corrupting force that would prevent the actualization of an ideal or peaceful home in a predominantly white suburban neighborhood, where escape from blackness and the pathologies associated with it, including crime, are idealized. Black people are the community’s hidden and unspoken fear, a fear that looms (ironically even more than the literal horrors carried out in the town among its white citizenry), linked to auras of blackness classically illustrated within gothic writing. Toni Morrison has famously discussed the Africanist presence that inflects early canonical American literature, even when black bodies are absent and black characters do not materialize within gothic narratives.

Psy wojny kontra kundle pokoju: siła hybrydowości w powieści Vieta Thanha Nguyena „Sympatyk"

The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, as he often repeats, is a person of two minds. As the child of a Vietnamese woman and a French Catholic priest, he becomes a „hybrid” on the genetic level and later also in the cultural sphere. His upbringing has not only been influenced by the Catholic religion, communist indoctrination but also by the American literary canon, as he has graduated from a literary studies program in the US. He is a communist spy in the South Vietnamese Army during the war, and after the fall of South Vietnam he escapes to the United States as one of the few refugees. Loyal to the communist revolution in the US, he continues his intelligence activities going to any lengths and using any means considered necessary. The nameless narrator is not only a character that reminds a hero from a Hollywood action movie, but also a hybrid – a man who, through diversity or perhaps the merging of mutually exclusive identities, inhabits the sphere in between. This phenomenon, called nepantlerismo by Gloria Anzaldúa, means consciously navigating the gaps between the binary oppositions of those who belong to neither of the two sides. In the article, I look at the phenomenon of hybridity and consider to what measure it can be seen as an antidote to national chauvinism, imperialism and violence. I also examine what Viet Thanh Nguyen in his scholarly work calls the „industrialization of memory,” viewing Hollywood as a tool for producing memories of the Vietnam War operating within the US military-industrial complex.

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

ANOCRITICAL READINGS OF THE INTERSECTIONS OF AGE AND GENDER IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: A FEMINIST CRITIQUE

Abstract Intergenerational relationships have been present features in texts from the American literary canon that often problematizes the intersections of age and gender. This paper investigates how representations of intergenerationality provide the opportunity to explore the concepts of relationality and intersectionality through a feminist lens. Maierhofer’s concept of anocriticism was used in in the analysis of Julia Alvarez’ In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing (2016) to validate individual experiences of gendered ageing. This paper presents ways in which this particular intersection can be viewed as a potential site of resistance towards what it means to grow old as a woman. Placing literature in a cultural, social, and political context, traditional paradigms can be reconstructed and heteronormative assumptions of age and gender can be deconstructed by focusing on the individual narratives and their potential for resistance.

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

The French Reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Belated Consecration

The French Reception of <i>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i>: A Belated Consecration

New Perspectives on William Demby: A Special Issue of African American Review

New Perspectives on William Demby:A Special Issue of African American Review Melanie Masterton Sherazi (bio), Ugo Rubeo (bio), and James C. Hall (bio) Introduction Following his service in Italy during World War II, William Demby (b. 1922) returned to live in Rome in 1947. Inspired by Giorgio de Chirico's paintings that he viewed often at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum in his youth and by Roberto Rossellini's films, Demby considered a move to Rome as the "gritt[ier]," less obvious choice than Paris for an artist.1 Rents were cheap in a city rebuilding itself from the rubble of fascism and war and a revolutionary antifascist current flowed through the artistic circles into which Demby landed, rather serendipitously, upon his postwar return. He was invited almost immediately to live in a flat on Via San Teodoro overlooking the Ancient Forum with a group of Italian leftist and Communist artists and filmmakers, including Renzo Vespignani and Marcello Muccini. There, he got back to work on his debut novel in progress, Beetlecreek, and was driven to complete it as an artist living among other serious artists. From his bohemian flat across from Rome's ancient ruins, Demby took a writing sojourn in the Palazzo Ca' Dario, an elegant, late fifteenth-century residence on Venice's Grand Canal, where Peggy Guggenheim was living just a few doors down.2 Of his first novel's extraordinary composition history, Demby himself acknowledged that some positive astral conjunction might have worked in his favor, recalling that "it all came together in a palace in Venice; and the first thing I know is that I had finished a novel" (qtd. in Micconi 131). Beetlecreek was, in fact, a novel several years in the making: Demby had work-shopped it before the war as Margaret Walker's student at West Virginia State College, then an HBCU.3 He continued drafting it during his service in Italy and while completing his studies at Fisk University under the mentorship of Robert Hayden.4 The spectacular Italian settings of Beetlecreek's composition are at odds with the novel's eponymous, fictional town in the segregated, Depression-era US South. Moreover, Demby's own mobilities signal the dizzying quality of his lived experiences in this period: a move with his family after high school from an integrated neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Clarksburg, West Virginia; his later wartime service in Italy in an African American troop; his settling into a flat overlooking the ruins of Ancient Rome; and his aforementioned retreat in a Venetian palace on the Grand Canal—all in the span of just a few years.5 In these ways and more, Demby's life and work resisted the entrenched racist norms of Jim Crow America. This special issue of African American Review appears in the centenary year of Demby's birth on Christmas Day in 1922. Although he was honored with an Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, Demby's body of work has struggled to gain a lasting foothold in the African American literary canon and in classrooms, perhaps for the very fact of his living off the radar for decades in Italy. In actuality, Demby often traveled between Italy and the United States while working and visiting family. The issue aims to energize new directions in the study of the overdetermined workings of literary reputation and of place, genre, and style in [End Page 111] the shaping of an African American canon. Presented largely in chronology with Demby's artistic career, which spanned over sixty years, the issue's essays celebrate and contend with his work's generative eclecticism and transnational orientations. Italian Contexts Just a few months after Beetlecreek's appearance in 1950, another fortuitous event happened to propel Demby's early career when the major Italian press Mondadori's "Medusa" series—widely acclaimed, and dedicated to the works of "Great Narrators of All Countries"—published Festa a Beetlecreek as Series No. 243 in its signature emerald-green hardcover. Demby's novel's translator, Fernanda Pivano, was a young intellectual from Turin who, though not an academic, was already on her way to becoming one of Italy's leading Americanists...

Lost Ladies: (Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work

Lost Ladies:(Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work Anna Creadick Peacocks are inspiring . . . but they sure don't stop to consider they might be standing in your way. —Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983, p. 59) For so long, and justifiably, the project of Legacy in general and the Profiles feature in particular has been a commitment to bringing women writers in. As we teach and write about women writers today, are there some who ought to be left out? Are there some women writers who, like Flannery O'Connor, to whom Walker is referring in the epigraph above, might even be "standing in [the] way"? In this essay I take up the case of Willa Cather in service of what might seem a counterintuitive question: Could the sidelining of some women writers ever be part of feminist recovery work? Where and why must we include or exclude a writer like Cather? And why, or at what cost, has she received what could be seen as an excess of scholarly attention? leaving cather out I recently decided to resuscitate an American women writers course long on the books at the small liberal arts college where I teach. After some agonizing about the book list, I decided to leave Cather out. That difficult choice led me to this essay.1 Cather's centrality to the American literary canon is as unquestionable as her critical status is formidable. Over twenty years ago, Phyllis Frus and Stanley Corkin charted a "climactic phase" of Cather scholarship, noting with satisfaction that "[a]t last count there were 860 online citations for [Cather] in the [End Page 102] MLA bibliography" (206). In the two decades since, that number has nearly tripled. The MLA International Bibliography currently lists more scholarship on Cather than on Edith Wharton or Kate Chopin, more than on Alice Walker or Zora Neale Hurston, more than on Tillie Olsen or Flannery O'Connor. Today, Cather trails only Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison as the most-studied American woman author.2 One explanation for the endless fascination with Cather as a subject comes from Deborah Carlin, who notes, "Whether viewed as an American icon, a woman writer, a lesbian, a cosmopolitan Midwesterner, a conservative Republican, a scathing journalist, an antimodernist, or an embittered elegiast, Cather remains an anomaly in American literature and her fiction is peculiarly hard to place" (6).3 These same qualities that make Cather so hard for scholars to "place" also make her so easy to place in the classroom. I could, and do, teach Cather in my Modern American Literature class and in my Sexuality and American Literature class. But in my American Women Writers course, I balked. Why? To manage the enormity of the course subject, I chose an organizing theme: "Feminist Recovery Work." We would read the women writers we might never have read at all if not for the labor of feminist critics who rescued those writers from obscurity, or at least from the margins. So I assigned Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. We read Gloria Anzaldúa, Mitsuye Yamada, and Grace Metalious. The course opened with Harriet Jacobs's 1861 slave narrative and closed with Janet Mock's 2014 memoir of trans womanhood, which enacts a different kind of recovery work while also regularly name-checking many authors already on the syllabus. But I kept Cather out. That decision had to do with three forces often at play in American women's writing: misogyny, canonicity, and feminism. misogynist (mis)readings Flashback, 2005: I was a new visiting assistant professor, teaching an American literature survey, when one especially enthusiastic student asked if he could come to office hours "just to talk more about the reading." I remember so clearly how he knocked on the doorjamb, stepped in, sat down in the late autumn light, looked up at me, and said, "I usually hate female writers—but I really love this book." After working to control my shock, I smiled weakly, took a breath, and in my mind began to compose a Cather paper. The book? Cather's 1923 novel A Lost Lady. A Lost Lady offers excellent terrain for...

“Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Reframing of That ‘which Milton tells about’: Literary Influence and Blithedale’s Queer Masque”

ABSTRACT This article situates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) within the debates around Fourierism, marriage, and Hawthorne’s literary legacy that took place in contemporary US magazines and periodicals in the mid-nineteenth century. In doing so, I rely on two notions of influence. First, while many periodicals regarded Hawthorne as a potential representative of a new national literature, they remained wary of the influence his unorthodox portrayals of marriage might have on readers and on the status of the nuclear family as the foundation of a sound society. Publications like The Southern Quarterly and The Church Review, and Ecclesiastical Register featured articles wishing that Hawthorne would fall in line with the British tradition of the neat marriage-plot, thus upholding the sanctity of marriage and securing his place within a burgeoning American literary canon. Second, I reframe Hawthorne’s relationship to his received literary patrimony, arguing that The Blithedale Romance queers the influence of the Miltonic masque tradition. In contrast to previous scholarship, which often seeks one-to-one allegories between the intertexts, I argue that The Blithedale Romance continually reappropriates situations and recasts characters from Milton’s Comus to expose contradictions and inconsistencies within hetero-patriarchal lineage and literary inheritance.

Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

Still Resisting after All These Years

ABSTRACT The impact of Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader on the development of feminist literary criticism, particularly of the American literary canon, is well known. The parallels between Fetterley's late 1970s call for women to become resistant readers and the work of literary historians invested in the actual reading practices of women reading women's writing (in novels of the early American period) are at the heart of this personal reflection.

Reading an Other

ABSTRACT The Resisting Reader by Judith Fetterley is a groundbreaking critique of the American literary canon that put together two major critical movements of the 1970s—feminist criticism and reception theory. Fetterley demonstrated how canonical American texts are “designed” to “immasculate” women readers, to compel them to identify with a male point of view, one of whose tenets is the designation of woman as other. Fetterley inspired the author to examine how women read women's texts and to formulate a theory of careful, responsible reading that does justice to the communicative project embodied in the text.

Álvaro Menen Desleal’s Speculative Planetary Imagination

Science fiction has long held a marginalized status within the Latin American literary canon. This is due to myriad assumptions: its supposed inferior quality, sensationalist content, and disconnect from socio-historical reality. In this article, I argue for the recuperation of Salvadoran author Álvaro Menen Desleal as a foundational writer of Central American speculative fiction. I explore why Menen Desleal turns to sci-fi - abstracting his fictive worlds to far-off futures or other planets - at a moment when the writing of contemporaries of the Committed Generation was increasingly politicized and realist. I argue that Menen Desleal’s speculative planetary imagination toggles between scaling up localized concerns and evading them altogether to play with “universal” categories. By thinking with the categories of the human or the planet from an ex-centric position, Menen Desleal playfully appropriates generic convention, only to disrupt it from within.

Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp

Reviewed by: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp Emily Orlando Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture. By Julie Olin-Ammentorp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. x + 386 pp. $60 cloth. Despite their status as major fixtures in the American literary canon, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) and Willa Cather (1873–1947) are rarely examined together. The last book-length study of the two appeared thirty years ago. As [End Page 185] Julie Olin-Ammentorp elucidates in her smart, eloquently written new book, the writers have been kept apart because they have been wrongly perceived as different. In one corner we find Edith the aristocratic chronicler of New York (a label overlooking her investment in other genres and demographics); in another sits Willa “the plainspoken pioneer” scribe of the Midwest (25). Olin-Ammentorp’s study accounts for what is lost by simplistically reading the writers as disparate and emphasizes the importance of place and the relationship between place and culture in their work. In so doing, the book illuminates the many meaningful ways the writers intersect. Indeed, as Olin-Ammentorp so ably teaches us, Cather, not Wharton, is the one who lived in New York for four decades, yet Wharton is remembered as the New Yorker. While Cather, in turn, has been mythologized as the prairie writer of Nebraska, “both authors lived for a relatively brief period in the places with which they are most associated” (10). This highly engaging new book examines fiction, life writings, and theories of art by the two Pulitzer Prize–winning honorary Yale degree recipients. Olin-Ammentorp reveals how they offer a similar criticism of dominant American culture as obsessed with money-making for its own sake and ill-equipped to appreciate anything beyond pure profit. Both writers emerge as exceedingly private Francophiles as deeply invested in culture and aesthetics as they were distrustful of modernism (26). They loved travel, gardens, and their homes and moved in the same circles. They shared influences like Henry James, Walter Pater, and the French naturalists and even a biographer. In the book’s rich, interdisciplinary context, we see Wharton and Cather anew. Olin-Ammentorp is ideally suited to this task. Her study brings together biographical and historical analysis with impeccable close reading, emphasizing place and aesthetics to document the writers’ surprisingly shared experience of dislocation, their connections to each other as writers, and the compelling links between their theories of fiction and their unacknowledged investment in the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States. The book “uses ‘culture’ to refer both to the ‘high’ culture Wharton and Cather valued and to ‘the ways distinct communities construct meanings’” (15). As Olin-Ammentorp explains: “Given Wharton’s and Cather’s concern with ‘the place of culture’ in American society, I chose to use that phrase in my title. But ‘the culture of place,’ the ways in which national or regional communities establish values, underlies ‘the place of culture’ and is equally a concern” (15). Laying the foundation for her study, Olin-Ammentorp draws on the critic Merrill McGuire Skaggs’s observation that “books talk to each other,” which in turn calls to mind Virginia Woolf ’s sense that books continue each other (2). Olin-Ammentorp certainly shows Wharton and Cather—whom the former once referred to as “the lady with the blurry name” (26)—to be engaged in a career-long conversation that has gone largely unrecognized. She identifies [End Page 186] this, for instance, in the first chapter’s discussion of the ways Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome mattered to Cather. In chapter 2, the book examines both writers’ quest to enter what they called “the Land of Letters” (Wharton) and “the kingdom of art” (Cather) (70). The third chapter, which begins the book’s section on the place of culture, examines New York City in Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Cather’s “Paul’s Case.” Chapter 4 considers the American West in such works as Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive and Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Chapter...

A Few Words on the US Literary Canon

A Few Words on the US Literary Canon Duane Niatum (bio) The term “literary canon” refers to a body of books, narratives and other texts considered the most important and influential writings of a particular place during a particular time period. The most important point of this discussion of the US Literary Canon is that any literary canon excludes works no matter how inclusive or selective the canon makers are. The ever-growing body of works by minority writers in general, and American Indian writers in particular, will be discussed in light of this characteristic. Through our education system, writes Jordan Bates, “when one is asked to read any novel, essay, poem or another sort of text, it is because a teacher or some other entity [or organization] decided that particular text should be canonized. Canons, then, are understood as value-determining [or value-defining] lists that are ingrained in our education system.” However, the political process of deciding whether a particular text is included or excluded from a given canon has long been controversial and debated by schools of all academic levels and disciplines. “According to the scholar Paul Lauter,” says Gregory Rutledge, “who historicized the American canon, the first American Literature classes began in the mid-to-late 1890s, during the same period the first American literature textbooks started.” “The upper Midwest was at the forefront of this development,” he continues, “probably because the East Coast schools were captivated by ‘tradition,’ which adhered to British, Old World poetics.” Midwest schools were not as dominated by adherence to British literature and were more free to discuss American writing. The American canon was taking shape in the upper Midwest as teachers and professors chose texts to assign and discuss. As these works were shared, the American Literary Canon began to take form. Accordsing to Stephen Behrendt, many of the educators who contributed to early canonization efforts were teachers and clergymen. Northern Midwest protestant clergymen were no doubt particularly influential. Comments Behrendt, [C]lergymen selecting texts that agreed with their morality is an early instance of selective canonization and suggests the way in which canons come to represent the ideology of those who select them. Apart from religious beliefs, other important factors characterized the demographic of the early dictators of the canon. Behrendt continues, “The Western Literary Canon has historically been dictated by economically secure, traditionally educated, socially privileged white men.” “Plus,” says Behrendt, “literacy was historically the province of the privileged and so, the uneducated or minimally educated — which included some women but most working-class citizens of both sexes, as well as children — were automatically excluded.” “We see the remnant of this class-based exclusionary thinking in today’s society in its disdain of ‘popular’ art like Harry Potter,” concludes Behrendt. This collection of commonly used writings was first referred to as a “canon” in the 1920s. It changed very little until the 1960s came along. As women and minorities were more widely accepted in universities, they challenged the narrow focus in the reading assignments and curricula and clamored to read and discuss works that reflected their own experiences and family histories. Behrendt points out canons by nature are exclusive. They are about closed communities — who is excluded is as important as who is included. A major problem with canons is they tend to allow others to choose what to read and discuss, causing people to sacrifice their ability to be free-thinking beings. It gives “away our liberty and independence of mind and action to the judgment of others,” says Behrendt. “Go a little further down that road and you meet Big Brother,” he continues. “[T]otalitarianism,” claims Behrendt, “is convincing people they don’t need to think for themselves, that the authorities — the Establishment — will take care of all that for them.” This battle for the mind is won by empowering readers to think critically. Canons can steal our power. Giving the power back to people in judging the truth of things, and “speaking truth to power” is the road for us to take now. A point to keep in mind regarding the fiction and poetry from American Indian authors is the interior landscape of the psyche...

Sur l’amour et le canon: H.D., Robert Duncan et ‘Venise-Vénus’

Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book offers an alternative literary history of modernism and contemporary poetry that moves H.D., Pound, Lawrence and Williams to its center, and that thus positions poets influenced by these four (including himself) as foundational to the post-WWII era. He also offers a narrative of H.D.’s career that elevates her poetry over her prose, which he sees as impure, mired in venery. For Duncan, Venice and Venus are at the heart of the problem with H.D.’s “Venetian” middle career. This paper will plumb representations of Venice and Venus in H.D.’s Trilogy and Duncan’s “The Venice Poem,” demonstrating how what H.D. termed “Venice-Venus” is central to Duncan’s notion of the modern American literary canon.

My Virtual French Summer: Encounters with Millennial French Poets

After my Study Abroad program in Paris was cancelled due to COVID-19, I decided to travel to France in a different way: through a virtual literary lens. For several weeks throughout the summer of 2020, I scoured hundreds of Instagram accounts and scrolled through numerous online French literary magazines—Recours au poème, 17secondes, Revue la piscine, Levure littéraire, and Les Tas de mots—in an attempt to find a new generation of millennial poets working across various modes of experimentation. In this article I present bilingually in translation six poets—Adeline Duong, Arthur Fousse, Marie Allègre, Kenny Ozier-Lafontaine, Ada Mondès, and Thibault Marthouret—in the hope that their literary innovations and experiments may have an impact on the American literary canon.