Circle Award Research Articles

On Death of a Salesman from the Perspective of Cultural Genes Interpretation of "American Dream"

Arthur miller (1915-2005), as the most outstanding master of drama in the United States and known as the "conscience of American drama", accurately depicted the post-war real society in the United States and the changes in social values. In 1949, Miller wrote the Death of a salesman, which became the peak of his drama creation and won the Pulitzer prize and the New York theatre critics circle award. The play tells the story of the United States in the turbulent social background of the 1940s, the protagonist Willy Loman's dream and the collapse of the whole family. By means of the combination of realism and expressionism, the drama reproduces the changes of social values and the sadness of the little people. In previous studies, most scholars focused on the disillusionment of the "American dream" of the minor characters in the drama, and took the deterioration of the "American dream" and the change of values in American society as the starting point. However, it may be difficult to understand Arthur Miller's interpretation of the "American dream" in the play without tracing the root of the "American dream" and exploring the deep cultural genes of the United States. This paper aims to analyse Arthur Miller's contradictory writings on the American dream in Death of a salesman from the perspective of meme.

Literary Attacks on Thornton Wilder

Abstract Having been attacked by the Marxist critic Michael Gold in 1930 for ostensibly ignoring the social issues of the day, and by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson in 1942 and 1943 with accusations insinuating plagiarism, Thornton Wilder responded primarily as a creative writer. Although his plays and novels reflect his own literary goals, some passages include subtle responses to his critics. His prefaces, personal correspondence, and memoranda for his attorneys directly responded to the accusations. The attacks, at times ad hominem and homophobic, and often made in bad faith, had consequences. Wilder experienced astonishment, disgust, and personal distress. As a result of one controversy, The Skin of Our Teeth failed to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, Wilder did not win, an outcome some critics attribute to these controversies. Wilder reacted to these attacks in the same way he lived his life and composed his writings, with poise, dignity, sensitivity, creativity, and an affirmation of human freedom.

Circling around Remembrance: A Conversation with Dorthe Nors

Circling around RemembranceA Conversation with Dorthe Nors Kathryn Savage (bio) CELEBRATED Danish writer Dorthe Nors's first nonfiction book, A Line in the World, translated by Caroline Waight, is a stunning work that documents a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast of Denmark, moving from Skagen to the Wadden Sea. "Wandering Houses," from Nors's collection of fourteen essays, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in the September 2022 issue of World Literature Today. Nors is the author of the story collections Wild Swims and Karate Chop, two novellas, and four novels, including Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. In her most recent book, her spare and stunning prose depicts the harsh Jutland Peninsula with immediacy, as she moves between the past and the present to record a nuanced and layered place. This work is as much about the external world as it is an exploration of inner weather and personal memory, and the result is an expansive and intimate archive of movement and belonging. Kathryn Savage: In your essay "The Tracks around Bulbjerg," you write, "The landscape is an archive of memory." What did you mean by this line? Dorthe Nors: I wrote A Line in the World in one year. One of the first things I noticed when I traveled in this landscape, which I've known my entire life, was that episodic memory was stored in the places I went. You see, that's how we work: we remember things when we reenter places we used to live in or travel through. Visit your childhood school, for instance, and I'm certain that an episodic memory that you've not been in touch with for ages will emerge from "the archive." The famous Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who traveled a lot, said: "To travel is to live." I changed that phrase a bit in A Line in the World: "To travel is to remember." Savage: You write both fiction and nonfiction. Would you describe the relationship between form and content in your own work? Nors: I want to write in all kinds of forms. I couldn't imagine spending my entire life as a writer who only writes novels, for instance. I love language. I love the things it can pick up on, describe, dig into. I treat my language as if it was an instrument; a cellist didn't become good at playing the cello without rehearsing every day and challenging themselves. The same with language for me. I want my instrument to really develop and grow, as a linguistic art, so I change forms. And while it's true that A Line in the World is composed of fourteen essays, I prefer to call them chapters since the book turned out to feel like one continuous essay to me. Savage: I once heard you describe writing a short story like standing on a stage and singing without stopping, You must be there! Do you think the essay form asks something different from the writer? Nors: I think that there will be elements of the intensity and the "in situ" presence of the short story in both the novel and the essay, as writing forms. The difference between novels and short stories is of course the length and the way intensity varies in the novel. A Line in the World has both novel and short-story qualities, but the difficulty here was that facts and nonfictive information—about landscape, places, local history—had to be embedded in the prose. That was quite a challenge. Essays tend to be didactic and lean toward an urge to educate the reader, and I don't like didactic information, [End Page 10] preaching, etc., being mixed up in my literature. I worked hard to figure out how to solve that problem. You could say that A Line in the World is a fusion of three forms—novel, short story, and essay—without completely being any of them. Click for larger view View full resolution Savage: Across prose forms, how do you balance the ideas that drive your work with the scenes and people themselves? Nors...

Society News - Fall 2022

This issue’s Society News includes a report on John Goodenough’s 100th Birthday, Publications Update, ECS Fellowship recipients, division contacts and division officer slates, staff news, and new institutional members and Leadership Circle Awards.

Society News - Summer 2022

This issue’s society news includes the 2021 ECS Highly Cited Researchers, the Board of Directors Report, publications update, society election results and new slate of officers, division contacts and division officer slates, staff news, and new institutional members and Leadership Circle Awards.

The Analysis of Tragic Characters’ Tragedy Origin in The Woman Warrior Based on Freudian Psychoanalysis

Maxine Hong Kingston is one of famous Chinese-American writers. Her prominent representative, The Woman Warrior, let her earn the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1976. This great work surprised literary circle and attracted quiet a few researchers and scholars to appreciate and evaluate. This work is divided into five parts: “No Name Woman”, “White Tigers”, “Shaman”, “At the Western Palace”, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Ripe”, which mainly tell about five females’ stories. With regard to this work, many studies have been conducted before. Here, this paper is designed to conduct the analysis of tragic characters’ tragedy origin in The Woman Warrior based on Freudian psychoanalysis. This paper finds that there are three psychological factors to contribute to the two tragic characters’ tragedy: the influence of the two tragic characters’ and people’s unconsciousness, the effect of tragic characters’ death instinct, and the tragic characters’ overuse of mental defense mechanisms which include displacement, depression, denial, and introjection.

Haiku Garden

Haiku Garden Harryette Mullen (bio) Find frogs and toads inevery yard. No garden iscomplete without them. Zipped tight in their sleep-ing bags—who could imaginetheir deep black-eyed dreams? Piquant peppers pleasetaunt tease with tongue-piercing taste,igniting desire. Of all edibleovaries, what could taste asluscious as sweet figs? Okra’s baby fuzzstiffens to bristles, loadedmissiles point to sky. Watermelon crossedAtlantic’s perilous waveswith blackseed cargo. Injuries sustainedwhile picking berries: snagged skin,bruised fruit, hurt feelings. [End Page 22] Harryette Mullen Harryette Mullen’s books include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a pen Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks Between, published in 2012 by the University of Alabama, won an Elizabeth Agee Prize. Graywolf published Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary in 2013. A critical edition of her poetry is forthcoming in 2023 from Edinburgh University Press. She teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at ucla. Copyright © 2021 University of Nebraska Press

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Author Isabel Wilkerson to Present Opening Session Lecture

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article APA & MeetingsFull AccessAuthor Isabel Wilkerson to Present Opening Session LectureSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:26 Mar 2021https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.4.28AbstractJoe HensonIsabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, will be the final speaker at the Opening Session of APA’s online Annual Meeting. Her topic will be “Our Racial Moment of Truth.”Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize while serving as the Chicago Bureau chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first Black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal.Wilkerson is the author of The New York Times best-sellers The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named to more than 30 “Best of the Year” lists, including those of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents was published in August 2020.Wilkerson will present the lecture “Our Racial Moment of Truth” during the Opening Session, which will be held on Saturday, May 1, at 10 a.m. Recording of this event is not permitted. For more information on this speaker, please visit prhspeakers.com. ■ ISSUES NewArchived

A Conversation with Camille T. Dungy

A Conversation with Camille T. Dungy Jacob Griffin Hall (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Beowulf Sheehan [End Page 168] Camille T. Dungy is a poet, essayist, professor, and editor based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade, Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. Dungy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, and her debut collection of personal essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her work has appeared widely in anthologies and in literary magazines, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, VQR, and Guernica. Dungy is currently a University Distinguished Professor, teaching in the English department at Colorado State University. This interview was conducted by e-mail between December 2020 and February 2021. [End Page 169] JACOB GRIFFIN HALL: Could you tell us a bit about what initially drew you to writing poetry? CAMILLE T. DUNGY: I grew up in a family that values literature, poetry included, so I was reading poetry and having poetry read to me from a very young age. I remember memorizing my first poem in kindergarten or first grade. I have always loved the taut power of a poem. The way some of us love watching world-class sprinters do their thing. Those quick bursts of power and import. That's exciting. HALL: Your first book of poems, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, is a collection of loose sonnets. Much of your later work is formally conscious but still free verse. How has your relationship to form evolved over the course of your career? DUNGY: I often think that landing on that rogue sonnet form in my first book was one of the best things that could have happened to me as a writer. It taught me a lot about the power of rigor and tradition as well as the power of improvisation. My whole career I've played with toggling between using elements of received forms and resisting them. I love counting the syllables in my lines, the beats in each line, the number of lines in a poem. The ways that rhyme can work to suggest a familiar form, even if the poems don't exactly and perfectly implement that received form's rules. I like paying attention to what forms may echo through my poems. My parents listened to a lot of jazz when I was growing up. Listening to jazz, you can often hear the echo of classic songs from different traditions buried inside songs that sound nothing like those referent pieces but which are also clearly shaped by the referent pieces. I like to play with traditional forms in a similar way. HALL: I love the comparison to jazz here, and the idea of form echoing through a poem even when it doesn't fully conform to its rules. A lot of poets whose work I'm drawn to take up sonnet variation in this way—Wanda Coleman's American Sonnets, Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, and more recently Diane Seuss's forthcoming frank: sonnets. Do you think there's something particular to the sonnet that makes it a good site to explore this meeting of tradition and improvisation? [End Page 170] DUNGY: Absolutely! The sonnet is already like a little argument. A mini-essay. Like those five-paragraph theme essays of our school days. You open the sonnet with a set of expectations of what a sonnet will be (for instance: about love, both attainable and unattainable), and the sonnet proceeds for a while either confirming or disabusing you of this expectation. Then the poem goes a bit deeper into this idea until the volta around the eight or tenth line, depending on how traditional the sonnet is. At the point of this turn, the poem either moves even deeper into the line of inquiry or turns in another direction. Then, depending on the kind of sonnet it is again...

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song ed. by Kevin Young

Reviewed by: African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song ed. by Kevin Young Mildred R. Mickle African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, edited by Kevin Young. New York, Library of America, 2020. 1150 pp. $45.00 hardcover. Kevin Young's 1,100-plus-page anthology provides an intriguing selection of African American poetry that was published from the late eighteenth century all the way to 2020. The lineup of poets in this book rightly begins with Phillis Wheatley, whom Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003), terms "the mother of African-American literature" (50). Wheatley's groundbreaking, pre-Revolutionary War poetry, published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), provided a much-needed critique of the foundation of American conceptions of independence. At the anthology's opposite end we have poets younger than forty, such as National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ishion Hutchinson and Aja Monet and Jamila Woods, activists and civic engagers of the twenty-first century who are training the next generation of poets and paying homage to those who have died in the ongoing struggle for agency and autonomy. In between are selections by nineteenth-century enslaved and free poets, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, poets of the Black Arts Movement, and work by a number of Pulitzer Prize winners: Gwendolyn Brooks (1945), Rita Dove (1987), Yusef Komunyakaa (1994), Natasha Trethewey (2007), Tracy K. Smith (2012), Gregory Pardlo (2015), Tyehimba Jess (2017), and Jericho Brown (2020). Young also represents a variety of award-winning poets from abroad, including 1992 Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, who lived much of his life in St. Lucia, and the Emmy-winning Kwame Dawes, who came to America from Ghana and Jamaica. Here too is much-loved Maya Angelou, a three-time Grammy winner and the author of the 1992 presidential inaugural poem. Young also makes a concerted effort to present work by lesser-known poets. In his introduction, which is titled "The Difficult Miracle," Young writes: [End Page 577] African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song captures a quarter-millennium of Black poetry in the Americas, from Phillis Wheatley to the present day. Whether we consider that time span to consist of what June Jordan calls "the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America," what Amiri Baraka names "the changing same," or the pleasure that Toi Derricotte invokes when she says "joy is an act of resistance," this anthology provides a comprehensive look at the centuries of song and struggle that make up African American verse, a legacy that is fruitful and large enough to barely be represented by one volume. (xxxix-xl) Not only was it "difficult" for African Americans to write and publish poetry, but it is also difficult to capture the scope of that extensive body of literature accurately. What Young has achieved in this volume is to be commended. He does note that he made the executive decision to omit certain types of oral poetry like the blues and spirituals (xlii-xliii), but he compensates for that lack by including "poems in translation by American poets of African descent writing in languages other than English" (xliv). And, to narrow the selection further, he limits the geographic region to the United States and parts of the Caribbean. It would have been helpful to have poems from some of the French-language writers of the Negritude movement, such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, who were influenced by Langston Hughes's efforts in the Harlem Renaissance. America is a postcolonial state, and the literary production of African Americans contributes significantly to the development of a postcolonial ethos. That very effort sent shock waves back to countries like Césaire's Martinique and Senghor's Senegal as black artists there struggled to find their own postcolonial aesthetic. Césaire's and Senghor's works have been translated into English from French. Still, it is easy to see why Young had to limit the scope of this volume. Already over eleven hundred pages long, the book hardly had room for more. The anthology is divided chronologically into eight sections; Young titles each with a quotation...

Open Water

Open Water Ada Limón (bio) It does no good to trick and weave and losethe other ghosts, to shove the buried deeperinto the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come,my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistentin water I cannot tell if it is a wave or youmoving through waves. A month before you diedyou wrote a letter to old friends saying you swamwith a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye,but what you told me most about was the eye.That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fishthat passed you during that last-ditch defiant swim.On the shore, you described the fish as nothingyou'd seen before, a blue-gray behemoth moving slowlyand enduringly through its deep fathomlessNorth Pacific waters. That night, I heard moreabout that fish and that eye than anything else.I don't know why it has come to me this morning.Warm rain and landlocked, I don't deserve the image.But I keep thinking how something saw you, somethingwas bearing witness to you out there in the oceanwhere you were no one's mother, and no one's wife,but you in your original skin, right before you died,you were beheld, and today in my kitchen with younow ten years gone, I was so happy for you. [End Page 120] Ada Limón Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fourth book, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Copyright © 2021 Middlebury College

An Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides

© Gaspar Tringale Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to major critical and popular acclaim in 1993. It has since been translated into thirty-four languages and adapted on screen by Sofia Coppola. His second novel, Middlesex (2002), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the French Prix Medici. The Marriage Plot (2011), his third novel to date, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. First publ...

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Society News - Fall 2020

In this edition, we present news on student voting, the 2020-2021 ECS Toyota Young Investigator Fellowships, 2020 Outstanding Student Chapters & Chapter of Excellence Winners, 2019 Journals Impact, Editorial Board Appointments, Focus Issues for ECS Journals, and ECS Blog Highlights, along with the Leadership Circle Awards, Staff News, and a winter preview.

In Siren Times

Poet, essayist, and translator, Sherod Santos’s most recent collection of poems is Square Inch Hours (W. W. Norton, 2017). A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The New Yorker Book Award. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he works in an outreach program for the homeless.

The Function of Time Figuration in Reading Atonement

This study investigates the relationship between time and memory in McEwan's novel Atonement and the role the three different kinds of time figuration play in constructing the harmony among characters, authors and readers. Atonement is another masterpiece after First Love, Last Rites and Amsterdam, for it gains several literary prizes: the Smith Award, the National Book Critics Circle and Santiago European novel Award. In Atonement, McEwan describes the protagonist Briony's memory dilemma through disrupting the linearity and stability of narrative and readers are often caught in a Foucault-like maze in reading. Ricoeur's interpretative theory of mimesis and figuration provides a new hermeneutic dimension to the interpretation of the text and an alternative perspective to the reader. In fact, the understanding of the novel can be helped by the dynamic cycle of figuration chains including prefiguration, configuration and refiguration. In prefiguration, the underlying reasons for the central event in Briony's memory are introduced. The key links between historical and individual events, the past and the present, the main and messy plots scattered throughout the novel could be organized by emplotment in configuration. In refiguration, Briony's reconstruction of the same events is achieved by meta-narrative strategy. To sum up, the time figuration model contributes to the interpretation of Atonement and the analysis of the figuration strategy provides possible spiritual sustenance for the child who experiences traumatic events in the early stages.

“Every Novel is a New Country”: A Conversation with Junot Díaz

ABSTRACTJunot Díaz (born on December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fiction editor at Boston Review. He was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and immigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and obtained his MFA from Cornell University. Díaz is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Drown (1996), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2012, and was also the recipient of PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O Henry Award. He was appointed chair of the Pulitzer Board in April 2018. This conversation took place at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 6, 2019.

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Beyond Graphic Memoir: Visualizing Third-Generation German Cultural Identity in Nora Krug's Belonging

Beyond Graphic Memoir:Visualizing Third-Generation German Cultural Identity in Nora Krug's Belonging Tammy Clewell (bio) "We are made of the past."—Nora Krug In her 2018 visual memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, Nora Krug, a German-born artist in her early forties who has lived in New York for more than two decades, grapples with a personal and collective legacy that she describes as darkly shadowed by the Second World War (2018a). Krug's book—a formally innovative and visually stunning collage of comics, family photographs, journals, letters, and newspaper clippings, along with war memorabilia, official documents, phone books entries, and maps—responds to an unspecified yet trenchant sense of the collective guilt she feels as a German born in 1977, more than three decades after the war's end. In seeking to come to terms with what she describes as "the consequences of another generation's actions" (2018a, p. 16), Krug details her efforts to discover all she can about the wartime activities of her family members, including her maternal grandfather, whom she describes as an "in-between man"—in her words, neither "a resistance fighter nor a major offender" (2018a, p. 191)—and her paternal uncle, who was drafted into the SS and killed in battle at the age of 19.1 In addition to conducting field research and gathering materials from German archives and flea markets, she also questions her mother and father, both of whom were born just after the [End Page 459] war's end, to ascertain whether they countered the widespread culture of silence, denial, and disavowal that persisted at least through the late 1950s by asking their parents and other relatives what they did and did not do during the war. The critical acclaim that Belonging has garnered in the U.S., Germany, and other European countries suggests that Krug's representation of a lasting legacy of collective guilt among the children and grandchildren of the war generation has touched a nerve still sensitive for some and ignited the imagination of others across multiple populations today. Winner of numerous awards, including the American 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award Prize (in autobiography), the British Victoria and Albert Museum's Book Illustration Prize, the German Youth Literature Prize and, also in Germany, the Protestant Book Prize, Krug's memoir begins by exposing what she regards as the incomplete nature of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—Germany's effort to come to terms with the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. Following Allied initiatives, including the public recognition of war crimes at the 1945 Nuremberg trials and the process of denazification, and after a protracted period of silence and denial, the German struggle to acknowledge and overcome the negative consequences of the past, as was established in the 1960s and reconfirmed in the 1980s, has taken place through official programs of commemoration and, perhaps primarily, through formal education in the schools, where children, starting around the fifth grade, learn about Nazism and typically visit a concentration camp museum. Krug's German education reflects the country's longstanding and deep commitment to publicly acknowledge and reflect on the past; indeed, she remarks that her studies provided her with an understanding of "the scope of the atrocities committed" and "evidence of our collective guilt" (2018a, p. 22). However, this schooling failed her, she reports, in two significant ways. First, her education did not help her move beyond a paralyzing form of collective guilt, one that she describes as being heightened by the fact that she has lived most of her adult life outside Germany and that manifests, for instance, in her anxiety about speaking English on New York subways lest her accent reveal her German identity. In reflecting on her [End Page 460] education, Krug remarks, "Being FEHLERFREI (fault-free) was our universal goal. Our teachers' red pens divided our exercise books into right and wrong, and the red marks felt as reassuring in their clarity as they were forgiving" (2018a, p. 24). However, she concludes that the curriculum, for all its public openness about National Socialism, never encouraged students "to ask about one another's grandparents" (2018a, p. 24) or to inquire "about...