Collection Of Critical Essays Research Articles

COLLECTION OF ESSAYS AS A FORM OF CREATIVE REPRESENTATION IN THE CULTURE OF THE SILVER AGE

The article looks into the conceptual status of a collection of essays. This subject is investigated by using a number of different methods, of which the most significant ones are analytical, historical and cultural, with a general cultural and philosophical approach to understanding the essence and the semantic scope of the creative functions of a collection of essays. Particular attention is given to the relevance of the creation of a collection of essays as a special art form in the culture of the Silver Age. The article defines the reasons for a collection of essays and its specificity as a form of the presentation of the solely personal thoughts. The most significant characteristics of a collection of essays are identified in the example of the analysis of the collected volume of essays by D. S. Merezhkovsky “Eternal Companions”. Special attention is paid to the creation of the collection of critical essays as a reflection of the author’s thoughts and the era itself. For this purpose, the articles included in the content of the collection are analyzed. The specific subjectivity of the author’s comprehension of the literary works is noted, and in general it is fully consistent with the spirit of the times of the Silver Age. It is emphasized that the essays included in the collection reflect the dynamics of Merezhkovsky’s thoughts. The essays collected in the volume conform with the general mainstream of the author’s thoughts, they can be understood as a single whole, and the collection itself can be regarded as a form of the representation of a creative personality in the artistic culture of the Silver Age. Special attention is given to the personality of the publisher who was a good acquaintance of Merezhkovsky P. P. Pertzov. Following the analytical procedures carried out on the texts in Merezhkovsky’s collection “Eternal Companions”, it is noted that the characteristic features of the author’s ideas present him not only as a literary critic, but mostly as a thinker. Eventually, the general conclusions are made: the collection of essays goes beyond the limits of only one author, the principles of its organization are indicated, and the importance of the author’s interpretation of the literary and cultural events as a whole is noted.

Enoch Olujide Gbadegesin, Yunusa Kehinde Salami and Kola Abimbola (eds.) Exploring the Ethics of Individualism and Communitarianism. Harvest Day Publications ,2016,365p.

A collection of critical essays on Professor Segun Gbadegesin, one of the most preeminent figures in African philosophy, is by no mean an insignificant feat. This is all the more so because the volume has the objective of achieving a multidisciplinary interrogation of Gbadegesin’s philosophical oeuvre. This is a herculean task because Gbadegesin’s philosophical outputs straddles philosophy of culture, bioethics, social and political philosophy, ethics, and African philosophy. With his African Philosophy: Traditional Yorùbá Philosophy and Contemporary African Realities (1991), Professor Gbadegesin effectively brought deep philosophical insights into significant issues in Africa’s postcolonial malaise. The 16-chapter volume has a sufficiently wide array of significant scholars whose different perspectives provide a wide context within which to situate the brilliant scholarship of Segun Gbadegesin. These chapters all attempted to unravel the core of Gbadegesin’s multifaceted philosophical framework. While some confronted some basic elements of his work, like chapter four (human personality), seven (work), and nine (destiny), other chapters took the thematic concerns of, say, communitarianism and ethics as the springboard for further reflections on corruption, nationalism and nation building, citizenship, religion, personhood, leadership, race, justice, gender and the nature of African philosophy. However, with this distribution of chapters, there is a cogent doubt whether the book actually does critical justice to the imperative of critically engagement with Segun Gbadegesin’s philosophical corpus.

Speculative vertices, Ogun mythopoesis, and (the) fourth/further stage(s)

Wole Soyinka’s seminal essay, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy” which appears as appendix in his collection of critical essays, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), has been read and critiqued as an important work of myth, mythopoesis, tragedy and the Yoruba pantheon. To date, no meta-critical study has yet treated the essay as essentially speculative fiction, or as an invented model or construct for variegated possible future applications, or even as an authentic African futuristic artistic invention. This is important in present times as a resurgence of earlier genres and trends populate the literary world, thereby raising the need for underpinnings, connections, projections, and conflations such as this article presents. With the application of archetypal author-, text-, and context-oriented theoretical modes alongside historicity, this essay navigates and re-interrogates “The Fourth Stage” and its numerous critiques in the contexts of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, finding it a practical model for African futuristic mytho-cultural and literary productions. I also through this essay expose the multiple areas of possible applications of such inventiveness in the reappraisal and re-interrogation of the problematics and maladies of the postcolony.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

John Freccero (1931–2021)

John Freccero (1931–2021) Danielle Callegari John Freccero, Professor Emeritus of Italian and Comparative Literature at New York University, died on November 22, 2021 in Santa Cruz, California in the company of his family. He was ninety years old. He was predeceased by his wife Diane; he is survived by his first wife Yvonne, his children Carla, Stephen, Francesca, and Paola, and his grandchildren Isabella, Daniela, and Elijah. He is remembered as one of the greatest Dante scholars of his or any generation and a brilliant, inspiring teacher. His many publications and accolades hardly manage to capture the sweeping influence he had on the academic world and especially on his students, many of whom went on to become beloved teachers and prominent scholars themselves. Freccero was born on July 25, 1931 in New York City. His upbringing in an Italian-American family in Manhattan shaped him deeply even as he followed a trajectory very different from that of his immigrant parents, eventually receiving an academic scholarship to attend Johns Hopkins University, where he completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees. After pausing to serve in the military, he went on to pursue a Ph.D. from the same institution supported by the G.I. bill, and completed his dissertation in 1958 guided by the renowned Dantista Charles Singleton. His graduate and postdoctoral studies in Florence put him into contact with the important schools of philological and literary thought in the Italian and especially Florentine context, establishing his relationship with that city and the poet it had exiled. He recalled escaping to the hills of Florence during the flood of 1966 with his family in tow, and became a recognizable feature of Piazza Santo Spirito when he later regularly led the graduate program at New York University’s seat in Florence. [End Page 217] His first major essay, “Dante's Firm Foot and the Journey without a Guide” (The Harvard Theological Review, 1959), unraveled a long-contested crux in Dante studies and anchored Freccero as a dominant new voice in the field. It was later incorporated with his other contributions on Dante into a monograph edited by his student Rachel Jacoff, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, published by Harvard in 1986. Emphasizing the Augustinian framework that undergirds the Commedia and introducing theoretical constructs that had rarely if ever been applied to the poet, The Poetics of Conversion became essential reading not only for all students of Dante but also for any student of critical literary studies. Freccero had an uncanny ability to comment on large-scale phenomena through close reading, a talent that also came through in his work on subjects other than Dante. That his essays on John Donne, Italo Svevo, and Michelangelo Antonioni remain points of reference for students of those authors marks him as a rare example of a scholar whose work might be better defined as a practice unto itself rather than an exercise of a given methodology. In addition to his critically acclaimed Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, his published works include the edited anthology Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1965), and a second collection of essays, In Dante’s Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition (Fordham University Press, 2015), co-edited by Danielle Callegari and Melissa Swain. He composed the introductions for a number of notable American translations of Dante’s work, among them John Ciardi’s 1970 translation of Dante’s Paradiso and US poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s 1994 popular translation of Inferno. These publications are a reflection of how active he was in the field, as are the numerous awards and honors he received, beginning with two Fulbright fellowships for postdoctoral work, followed by a Guggenheim fellowship. The Dante Society of America bestowed him with a lifetime achievement award, and in 2015 he was among the elite group of scholars elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in the category of Humanities and the Arts. Importantly, his awards reflect his far-reaching influence, not only in the US but also in Italy, where he was honored with the Fiorino d’Oro from the city of Florence and the Premio Presidente della Repubblica for...

Coetzee, J. M. (2019). Tolstoy, Beckett, Flaubert and others. 23 essays on world literature. Translated by S. Martynova. Moscow: Eksmo. (In Russ.)

The review examines the Russian translation of the third collection of critical essays by the Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee. The forming of Coetzee's literary-critical canon is suggested to have roots in his approach to world culture, free of the arrogance of an imperial view or the inferiority complex of a ‘cultural back¬water.' Common points between Coetzee's literary criticism and fiction include, firstly, attention to the core mechanisms of human psyche, which inevitably reveal a kind of transcendental dimension, and, secondly, the drive to revise the boundaries of the known literary universe. At the same time, the reviewed translation of Coetzee's essays is at times incoherent and shows an inexplicable disregard for an accurate use of relevant terminology. The translation suffers from stylistic flaws, terminology blunders and quasi-scholarly definitions, which devalue Coetzee's contribution to the Russian discourse of literary studies.

Vladimir Nabokov in Context by Bethea David M. (review)

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 360 virtues of human nature as sincerity, truthfulness and modesty. Simplification, on the contrary, is ‘u-proshchenie’, or making the simple simpler than needed, doing something to it that would deform the originally positive. What Tolstoi proposes is something else, the ‘o-proshchenie’, the act of returning to the original prostota. Although there is no space in Donna Orwin’s latest book for anecdotes, such as the episodes with Orlenev, or for comment on specific schools of interpretation, her book brings the original, gloriouss prostota of Tolstoi’s biography, art and thought vividly into focus across the eight chapters covering the main events of Tolstoi’s life and afterlife — without even a trace of the ‘u-proshchenie’ that would seem inevitable in such a short study. This readable introduction, unburdened by the technicalities of specialty studies peculiar to individual disciplines and fields, is a product of the knowledge and skill of a consummate, clear-eyed master. We hear a personal voice in this wise distillation of Orwin’s lifelong dedication to Tolstoi as scholar, mentor and teacher. Based on her incomparably deep knowledge of Tolstoi’s oeuvre, his biography and historical environment, and being as up-to-date as possible in acknowledging the most recent criticism, this book presents a great resource for all categories of readers interested in Tolstoi. Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College & Inessa Medzhibovskaya Liberal Studies, The New School for Social Research Bethea, David M. and Frank, Siggy (eds). Vladimir Nabokov in Context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2018. xv + 320 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Further reading. Index. £74.99. Vladimir Nabokov in Context, edited by David Bethea and Siggy Frank, follows in the footsteps, some five decades later, of the first collection of critical essays on Nabokov edited by L. S. Dembo (Nabokov: The Man and his Work, Madison, WI, 1967). The aim of this volume, which features a star-studded field of Nabokov scholars is, to quote from the editors’ introduction, to ‘anchor Nabokov more firmly in the social, historical and cultural contexts of his time’ (p. 3). The book consists of four parts complemented by a ‘Further Reading’ section which provides bibliographical listings related to the themes of each chapter. The first two parts, ‘Identity’ and ‘Places’, are essentially biographical. ‘Identity’ deals with key aspects of Nabokov’s existence: his childhood, his relationship to women and to academia as well as fundamental aspects of his authorial persona. ‘Places’, as the title indicates, focuses on a geographically rich life which took Nabokov from St Petersburg to Montreux via Cambridge, REVIEWS 361 Berlin, Paris and ‘the crazy quilt of forty-eight [US] states’. The third part of the volume considers the central question of Nabokov’s relationship to literature and art. Alexander Dolinin and Siggy Frank explore the Russian elements of Nabokov’s literary career, while Michael Wood and Duncan White examine its American phase. The connection between Nabokov’s works and detective fiction is also analysed convincingly by Michael Oklot and Matthew Walker. The final section covers the area of ideas and culture including, amongst other stimulating contributions, an article by Stephen Blackwell about Nabokov’s achievements as an entomologist and, more broadly, his ‘insatiable curiosity’ in the sciences at large, from quantum theory and particle physics to psychology. Vladimir Nabokov in Context offers a competent and highly readable exploration of the complex relationship between the man and his work in the global context of his time. Some of the contributions approach Nabokov from more unusual perspectives — Julian Connolly’s ‘Friends and Foes’, Ann Komaromi’s ‘Samizdat and Tamizdat’, or Leonid Livak’s ‘Jewishness as Literary Device in Nabokov’s Fiction’ — which makes the volume all the more thought-provoking. Despite the undoubted quality of the collection, it is marred in places by the odd minor shortcoming. This is perhaps to be expected in a genre which relies on the capacity to draw connections between text and context and so demands a keen sense of synthesis. At first glance nothing would seem simpler than contextualizing, but appearances can be deceptive, for it is a difficult task, especially when it comes to drawing bridges between an author’s life and...

Otherwise, Revolution! Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’ by Rebecca Tillett

MLR, .,   characters—a Victorian poet and scholar. While there is much original and compelling discussion here, it is worth considering whether the unusual literary context rather complicates the ultimate meaning of the work in relation to contemporary poetry, and whether this section would have been more profitably given over to the analysis of a handful of stand-alone dramatic monologues by contemporary poets. e subsequent two chapters, which focus on ‘Revisionist Mythmaking’ and postcolonial British identity, provide further well-informed and insightful analyses, both formal and thematic. In tracing the formal and effective features of the genre, Merk astutely observes the diminishing use of ‘setting’ and ‘occasion’, as well as the corresponding feature of ‘dramatic action’ in contemporary examples of the genre. Using Alistair Fowler’s work on literary genres, the final chapter addresses the question of whether the dramatic monologue has passed through the three stages required (formation, development, transformation) to become a ‘modal form’ (p. ). Challenging the temporal dimension of Fowler’s argument, Merk asserts that the dramatic monologue has developed and transformed, without ‘the proper genre having exhausted itself first’ (p. ). She concludes that the dramatic monologue can be seen as a ‘mode’ partly because it has characteristics which are ‘permanently valuable’ (p. ) and that its energies and features manifest themselves in a range of prose works. As this volume demonstrates, the dramatic monologue’s liminal existence is integral to its value. Its ambiguity and slipperiness are the source of its creative power and it continues to influence contemporary writers of prose and poetry alike. ere seems a lot more to be said about the contemporary dramatic monologue, and this is a much-needed and valuable contribution to the field. S H U S R-J Otherwise, Revolution! Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’. By R T. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. . vi+ pp. £. ISBN – –––. Rebecca Tillett has been one of the most important and persistent advocates for the study of contemporary Native American and Indigenous literatures (see particularly her essential Contemporary Native American Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, )). roughout Tillett’s work, there is no text that she has returned to with greater frequency than Leslie Marmon Silko’s notoriously difficult Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin, ). Following closely on the heels of an edited collection, Howling for Justice: Critical Perspectives on Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’, ed. by Tillett (Tucson: Arizona University Press, ), Otherwise, Revolution! represents Tillett’s first monograph devoted solely to Silko’s ‘problematic and contentious’ second novel (p. )—and it is a fitting culmination of her thinking to date on the text. Situating her reading within the history of Almanac’s mixed reception, Tillett builds most explicitly on the previous scholarship of David L. Moore, on witnessing and ethics (‘Silko’s Blood Sacrifice: e Circulating Witness in Almanac of  Reviews the Dead’, in Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Louise K. Barnett and James L. orson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ), pp. –) and of Joni Adamson, on Indigenous environmental politics and political activism (‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics and the Reemergence of the Pluriverse’, in Howling for Justice, ed. by Tillett, pp. –). By extending these lines of enquiry, she proposes ‘some useful ways of reading Almanac for the reader who is bewildered’ and offers ‘some potential “remedies” for some of the text’s long-standing and entrenched misreadings’ (p. ). In this, Tillett is lucid; as she argues, Silko guides her reader through the dangerous individualistic wilderness of the text to show how cooperation, community and the ability to acknowledge the human and natural world as a holistic whole provides a clear and sustainable ‘remedy’ for the disposability and sterility of late-twentieth-century capitalist culture. (pp. –) Methodologically, Tillett seeks to follow Silko’s lead, centring her analysis on the Earth. Indeed, Tillett posits from the outset that in Almanac ‘the Earth is the central “character” of an exploration of the ways in which “enlightened” scientific detachment is predicated upon a separation of humanity from the natural world’ (p. ). As such, Tillett’s argument hinges on the ways in which such an Earth-centred reading of Almanac most clearly...

Introduction

Portuguese Studies vol. 36 no. 2 (2020), 129–31© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 Introduction Rosa Maria Martelo and Paulo de Medeiros ‘Is poetry important?’ asks Bernard O’Donoghue right at the beginning of his recentPoetry:AVeryShortIntroduction.1 Thisquestioning,andself-questioning, of poetry is so common as to probably qualify as one of poetry’s hallmarks. Suspicions of poetry, as well as grand claims about it, abound. From Plato’s (in)famous banishment of the poets from the ideal city, to Shelley’s equally wellknown and often cited assertion that ‘[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’,2 poetry, it seems, can stand for anything. Adrienne Rich has often questioned what the role and function of poetry is, and, more to our point now, what poetry’s standing in the world is. In a short essay printed in The Guardian, Adrienne Rich took this in her incomparable way, and commented ironically on the ‘free market view’ of poetry that would render it redundant: ‘There’s actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it’s unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together — and more’.3 The imbrications of poetry in society as well as poetry’s aesthetic claims, as Rich points out, do not constitute a paradox at all, and certainly are not mutually exclusive: ‘we can also define the “aesthetic”, not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, which totalising systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what’s still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched’. This is also, in a sense, what Emily Dickinson expressed so well, as O’Donoghue reminds us: ‘I dwell in Possibility — | A fairer House than Prose — | More numerous of Windows — | Superior — for Doors –’.4 Without claiming any universality for poetry, and mindful of the historical specificities that always inform any cultural expression, we would like to affirm much the same qualities, the same degree of introspection and critical self-reflection, of engagement with society in all of its variants, and the same exalted claims on 1 Bernard O’Donoghue, Poetry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 1. 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ [1821; 1840], in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 701. 3 Adrienne Rich, ‘Legislators of the World’, Guardian, 18 November 2006, [accessed 29 February 2020]. 4 Emily Dickinson, ‘I dwell in Possibility’, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston, New York, and London: Little, Brown and Co., 1961), p, 327; here as quoted by O’Donoghue, p. 47. Rosa Maria Martelo and Paulo de Medeiros 130 the aesthetic and the emphasis on form, from within the very multiplicity of voices and shapes, as marking contemporary Portuguese poetry. The present special issue of Portuguese Studies wants to focus on this poetry, from the latter part of the twentieth century to our actual present. This poetry figures here in various ways, most directly with the section containing a brief anthology of texts from some of contemporary Portuguese poetry’s most significant authors. And of course the collection of critical essays that engage with the various issues and problematics that have marked this poetry, including a continuous experimentation in terms of form, media, and intermediality. Added to this we also have six reviews of recent books and journals that allow for yet another view of our subject’s vibrancy. As organizers we refused any illusions or aspirations to exhaustive coverage, which would in any case always be impossible, even if we had more than the space of any one volume. Nonetheless we think that the current special issue, in both its critical and anthological components, allows for a productive reflection concerning the main lines that have been structuring contemporary Portuguese poetry, without dismissing in any way its modernist foundations. Indeed, it is not haphazardly that the critical essays, when read in sequence, make abundantly...

Introduction

Portuguese Studies vol. 36 no. 2 (2020), 129–31© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 Introduction Rosa Maria Martelo and Paulo de Medeiros ‘Is poetry important?’ asks Bernard O’Donoghue right at the beginning of his recentPoetry:AVeryShortIntroduction.1 Thisquestioning,andself-questioning, of poetry is so common as to probably qualify as one of poetry’s hallmarks. Suspicions of poetry, as well as grand claims about it, abound. From Plato’s (in)famous banishment of the poets from the ideal city, to Shelley’s equally wellknown and often cited assertion that ‘[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’,2 poetry, it seems, can stand for anything. Adrienne Rich has often questioned what the role and function of poetry is, and, more to our point now, what poetry’s standing in the world is. In a short essay printed in The Guardian, Adrienne Rich took this in her incomparable way, and commented ironically on the ‘free market view’ of poetry that would render it redundant: ‘There’s actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it’s unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together — and more’.3 The imbrications of poetry in society as well as poetry’s aesthetic claims, as Rich points out, do not constitute a paradox at all, and certainly are not mutually exclusive: ‘we can also define the “aesthetic”, not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, which totalising systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what’s still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched’. This is also, in a sense, what Emily Dickinson expressed so well, as O’Donoghue reminds us: ‘I dwell in Possibility — | A fairer House than Prose — | More numerous of Windows — | Superior — for Doors –’.4 Without claiming any universality for poetry, and mindful of the historical specificities that always inform any cultural expression, we would like to affirm much the same qualities, the same degree of introspection and critical self-reflection, of engagement with society in all of its variants, and the same exalted claims on 1 Bernard O’Donoghue, Poetry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 1. 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ [1821; 1840], in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 701. 3 Adrienne Rich, ‘Legislators of the World’, Guardian, 18 November 2006, [accessed 29 February 2020]. 4 Emily Dickinson, ‘I dwell in Possibility’, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston, New York, and London: Little, Brown and Co., 1961), p, 327; here as quoted by O’Donoghue, p. 47. Rosa Maria Martelo and Paulo de Medeiros 130 the aesthetic and the emphasis on form, from within the very multiplicity of voices and shapes, as marking contemporary Portuguese poetry. The present special issue of Portuguese Studies wants to focus on this poetry, from the latter part of the twentieth century to our actual present. This poetry figures here in various ways, most directly with the section containing a brief anthology of texts from some of contemporary Portuguese poetry’s most significant authors. And of course the collection of critical essays that engage with the various issues and problematics that have marked this poetry, including a continuous experimentation in terms of form, media, and intermediality. Added to this we also have six reviews of recent books and journals that allow for yet another view of our subject’s vibrancy. As organizers we refused any illusions or aspirations to exhaustive coverage, which would in any case always be impossible, even if we had more than the space of any one volume. Nonetheless we think that the current special issue, in both its critical and anthological components, allows for a productive reflection concerning the main lines that have been structuring contemporary Portuguese poetry, without dismissing in any way its modernist foundations. Indeed, it is not haphazardly that the critical essays, when read in sequence, make abundantly...

Critical Insights: The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Critical Insights: The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays. Eds. MichelleAnn Abate and GwenAthene Tarbox. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. 372 pp. $70.00 cloth.

Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays. Eds. MichelleAnn Abate and GwenAthene Tarbox. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. 372 pp. $70.00 cloth.

We’re All YA Now: A Review of Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults

Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox, University Press of Mississippi, 352 pages, 2017, ISBN 978-1-4968-1167-7 This article is a review of Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox (University Press of Mississippi, 2017). Filling a significant gap in current scholarly research in comic studies, the collection will appeal to a wide range of scholars and educators. The review argues that reading this collection is less of a chore and more of a joyful journey of discovery.

Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place

Transcripts from a Camera An overturned chair is a sign of not having feet on the ground. A left-open door doesn’t know what to do. And the empty mirror again reflects the aimless prowling of the light against a silent wall. The alarm clock has started to stutter. Something like the trickling of silence in a hollow pit reaches the ear. Translations from the Persian By Kaveh Bassiri Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place Ed. Annick Smith & Susan O’Connor Milkweed Editions I n many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the idea of the hearth is often defined by its opposite: in 2018 it’s difficult not to feel engulfed by traumas at the psychological, social, political, climactic, and global scales. In a stark reckoning by Gretel Ehrlich on the “culture of abuse and untruth” in which we live, she questions whether—in the face of cultural and biological worlds disappearing “with no hope of return”—the concept of home and hearth might not be a “cruel joke.” And in an era marked by “a sixth biological extinction, economic violence, and social disintegration,” Barry Lopez wonders where we might find our spiritual footing. “What is the hearth of the Anthropocene?” he writes. “What, now, is the symbol of our allegiance and our concern for one another’s fate?” For Lopez, the fire that he builds out of arctic willow twigs burns with a primordial centering effect for those who gather around it, a stay against the “outer dark” just beyond the edge of their encampment. Many of the other contributors to Hearth seek a “rooted relatedness” to something larger than the self (Carl Safina), a sense of becoming in “deep time” (Mary Evelyn Tucker), or alternative “narrative mappings” (Boey Kim Cheng). Scottish essayist Zoë Strachan , writing about the “numinous” quotidian found in archaeological digs that reveal both death chambers as well as the ancient domestic activities of keeping warm, cooking, and storytelling around hearths, contends: “We all want a center, a lodestone, a connection to the past that will write us into the narrative that leads to the future.” Repairing trauma is a frequent theme throughout the book. Geffrey Davis finds consolation in fishing and writing, Andrew Lam mourns the “lost enchantment” of his native Vietnam, and Debra Magpie Earling witnesses her father save himself—and his family—from violence even though his own life is predicated on violence. Yvonne Owuor accepts the “dreadful gift . . . of seeing the world as it is and then being asked to love it.” And Australian poet Mark Tredinnick writes movingly of succumbing to depression in midlife, leaving him bereft of family, “unhearthed” and “unhoused.” Turning to poetry as a way of “piecing” together his mind again, Tredinnick rediscovers his “miraculous part in the larger scheme of things” and fashions a new hearth to replace the one he lost. “In a good poem,” he writes, “some of the integrity of the cosmos coheres in us, notwithstanding the turmoil in our heads.” “We live within a blaze of transience both inevitable and complete,” writes Jane Hirshfield. Hearth captures both the evanescence of that blaze and its enduring power to heal us. Daniel Simon Editor in Chief editor’s pick Mehrdad Fallah (b. 1960) is one of the most influential Iranian poets of recent decades. The author of ten books of poetry, Fallah has also published a translation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and a collection of critical essays on contemporary Iranian poetry. Kaveh Bassiri’s translations received a 2019 NEA fellowship and can be found in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, and Massachusetts Review. Visit worldlit.org to listen to recordings of “A Conversation from Far, Far Away” and one other poem in Persian, plus read two bonus poems. WORLDLIT.ORG 31 ...

Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place

Transcripts from a Camera An overturned chair is a sign of not having feet on the ground. A left-open door doesn’t know what to do. And the empty mirror again reflects the aimless prowling of the light against a silent wall. The alarm clock has started to stutter. Something like the trickling of silence in a hollow pit reaches the ear. Translations from the Persian By Kaveh Bassiri Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place Ed. Annick Smith & Susan O’Connor Milkweed Editions I n many of the essays and poems in this remarkable new collection, the idea of the hearth is often defined by its opposite: in 2018 it’s difficult not to feel engulfed by traumas at the psychological, social, political, climactic, and global scales. In a stark reckoning by Gretel Ehrlich on the “culture of abuse and untruth” in which we live, she questions whether—in the face of cultural and biological worlds disappearing “with no hope of return”—the concept of home and hearth might not be a “cruel joke.” And in an era marked by “a sixth biological extinction, economic violence, and social disintegration,” Barry Lopez wonders where we might find our spiritual footing. “What is the hearth of the Anthropocene?” he writes. “What, now, is the symbol of our allegiance and our concern for one another’s fate?” For Lopez, the fire that he builds out of arctic willow twigs burns with a primordial centering effect for those who gather around it, a stay against the “outer dark” just beyond the edge of their encampment. Many of the other contributors to Hearth seek a “rooted relatedness” to something larger than the self (Carl Safina), a sense of becoming in “deep time” (Mary Evelyn Tucker), or alternative “narrative mappings” (Boey Kim Cheng). Scottish essayist Zoë Strachan , writing about the “numinous” quotidian found in archaeological digs that reveal both death chambers as well as the ancient domestic activities of keeping warm, cooking, and storytelling around hearths, contends: “We all want a center, a lodestone, a connection to the past that will write us into the narrative that leads to the future.” Repairing trauma is a frequent theme throughout the book. Geffrey Davis finds consolation in fishing and writing, Andrew Lam mourns the “lost enchantment” of his native Vietnam, and Debra Magpie Earling witnesses her father save himself—and his family—from violence even though his own life is predicated on violence. Yvonne Owuor accepts the “dreadful gift . . . of seeing the world as it is and then being asked to love it.” And Australian poet Mark Tredinnick writes movingly of succumbing to depression in midlife, leaving him bereft of family, “unhearthed” and “unhoused.” Turning to poetry as a way of “piecing” together his mind again, Tredinnick rediscovers his “miraculous part in the larger scheme of things” and fashions a new hearth to replace the one he lost. “In a good poem,” he writes, “some of the integrity of the cosmos coheres in us, notwithstanding the turmoil in our heads.” “We live within a blaze of transience both inevitable and complete,” writes Jane Hirshfield. Hearth captures both the evanescence of that blaze and its enduring power to heal us. Daniel Simon Editor in Chief editor’s pick Mehrdad Fallah (b. 1960) is one of the most influential Iranian poets of recent decades. The author of ten books of poetry, Fallah has also published a translation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and a collection of critical essays on contemporary Iranian poetry. Kaveh Bassiri’s translations received a 2019 NEA fellowship and can be found in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, and Massachusetts Review. Visit worldlit.org to listen to recordings of “A Conversation from Far, Far Away” and one other poem in Persian, plus read two bonus poems. WORLDLIT.ORG 31 ...

Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox

Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox

SENECAN POSTSCRIPT

Eliot was always right to a degree, banally so. Much of the visceral, emotional and intellectual force of Senecan tragedy, like that of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists whom Seneca inspired, is necessarily verbal. But, as Trinacty's closural analysis and the other studies of this volume attest, there are ‘further realities’—many and diverse: poetic, theatrical, political, rhetorical, psychological, moral, cultural—‘behind’ the language itself. This collection of critical essays is the latest manifestation of the resurgence of Senecan scholarly and intellectual energy which has taken place in the thirty plus years since the 1983 publication of the Ramus volume on Seneca Tragicus. That volume not only displayed with disdain the above quotation from Eliot, but paraded itself lamentably as ‘the first collection of critical essays devoted specifically to Senecan tragedy to be published in English’.

A conversation with George Bowering

George Bowering was born in Penticton , British Columbia in 1935 and grew up in the nearby town of Oliver . He is one of Canada’s most prolific writers, with over one hundred books to his credit, not including more than thirty chapbooks. A poet, novelist, essayist, critic, professor, historian, and editor, he is also an enthusiastic supporter of emerging writers. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian. He has twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award – for poetry (1969) and for fiction (1980) –, the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Poetry (1991 and 1992), the Canadian Author´s Association Award for Poetry (1993), holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of British Columbia (1994) and University of Western Ontario (2003), was the recipient of the Order of Canada (2003) and the Order of British Columbia (2004)., and was appointed the first Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2202-2004). He also received the Lieutenant Governor´s Award for Literary Excellence (2005) and The Pandora Collective Distinctive Body of Work Award (2011). His writing is quite experimental and his sharp witted, skeptical take on human nature and politics is definitely provocative in his discussing of what might be original about B. C. and the Canadian poet within a Eurocentric culture. A representative sample of his poetry can be found in Rocky Mountain Foot (1969), The Ganges of Kosmos (1969), Autobiology (1972), Selected Poems: Particular Accidents (1980), West Window (1982), The Kerrsidale Elegies (1984), Delayed Mercy and other poems (1987), Vermeer´s Light: Poems 1996-2006 (2006) and The World, I guess (2015). Like the work of the U.S. poets he admires – William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley – Bowering’s poems, even at their most extended and philosophical, use vernacular, everyday language, and focus on immediate aspects of everyday life. From his fiction, A Short Sad Book (1977) and the historical trilogy about British Columbia, Burning Water (1980), Caprice (1988) and Shoot! (1994) stand out. He has also published seven collections of critical essays, five memoirs, three books of historical nonfiction and six plays.

Voices in Conflict

Voices in Conflict Duncan F. Kennedy I first came across the Harvard School as an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1970s. While studying the Aeneid, I'd come across in the college bookshop a copy of Steele Commager's Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) in Prentice Hall's Twentieth Century Views series. I was beginning to develop an interest in mapping literary critical approaches, and Commager's book on Horace's Odes had fixed [End Page 88] him in my mind as one of the foremost proponents of New Criticism in the study of Latin poetry. I was therefore keen to see what would be included in a volume on Virgil in an extensive series devoted to "the best in contemporary critical opinion on major authors." Adam Parry's "Two Voices" struck me as the most intriguing essay in the collection, in particular for the meticulous close reading of Aen. 7.759–760 in the opening pages, which seemed all the more poignant given awareness of the tragic circumstances of Parry's own recent death. The memory of first reading Parry is still vivid, but I found it difficult to feel wholly satisfied by his argument, and not simply because it transpired that these were the last days of the dominance of New Criticism and its default formalism. Growing up in Ireland in the 1970s was to become conscious of how contested history was. To hear accounts of the same event in the news bulletins of the Irish broadcaster RTE and Britain's BBC was to hear two very different, and not easily reconciled, voices—itself a day-by-day education in the contrasting perspectives generated by different historical narratives and traditions; the political nuances of a language and its terms seemingly shared (thus what constitutes peace, how is it achieved, and from whose perspective?); and divergent notions of how the world worked, usually inexplicit and perhaps unconsciously held. These considerations were relevant to my reading not only of the Aeneid, but of literary accounts of it as well. The dynamism at the start of Parry's reading gave way for me to a conclusion that seemed inadequate to the tensions that he had so thoughtfully unfolded: "The Aeneid enforces the fine paradox that all the wonders of the most powerful institution the world has ever known are not necessarily of greater importance than the emptiness of human suffering." I was not sufficiently equipped at the time to define what it was about the rhetoric of this closing sentence that disappointed me. I read Frank Kermode's The Classic (1975) shortly afterwards, and felt that it was a profoundly important book for the way it explored the poem's engagement not only with history but in history, and that Kermode's perspective was addressing in some way the dissatisfaction I had felt with Parry. However, its influence on me was postponed, as I could not easily place it within the interpretative approaches my philological training had provided me. That had to wait for the well-fuelled lucubrations I enjoyed in Bristol with Charles Martindale as we discussed the challenges (methodological and metaphysical) that reception studies, with their emphasis on the historicity of contexts of reading, not least one's own, pose to interpretative practice. [End Page 89] These issues continue to exercise me, as my most recent engagement with the Aeneid in the second chapter of my Antiquity and the Meanings of Time (2013) shows. I don't mention Parry there, but he memorably developed for his moment and his context, and for me, an agenda about the relationship of aesthetics and politics. Students in my classes on the Aeneid will recall me juxtaposing his essay with Walter Benjamin's dictum from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" that "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism," followed by the injunction "Discuss!" This they duly did, with results for all concerned that were never less than interesting. Duncan F. Kennedy University of Bristol Copyright © 2017 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc.

Circle Games from Pharr to Stahl

Circle Games from Pharr to Stahl Richard F. Thomas Unlike Tennyson—"I who loved thee since my day began"—I came to Virgil relatively late in life. I think we read bits of the Aeneid in school in New Zealand, but frankly don't remember having done so. For better or worse, I did not share the experience of countless U.S. schoolchildren, and generations of their teachers, who read selections from Aeneid 1–6 in the innovative school commentary of Clyde Pharr, first published in 1930, the preface stating that "the author is much pleased to offer this little volume in homage to the spirit of the bard of Mantua at a time when all the world is uniting to pay him tribute" (1998: xii).1 Pharr, a specialist in Roman law, wrote nothing on Virgil beyond a preface, which has been read and absorbed for the past eighty-five years by many schoolteachers of Virgil, and presumably passed on to their charges. This textbook was later used, and in some cases still is, in the teaching of the AP Latin syllabus ("Vergil" until 2012, "Vergil and Caesar" since the 2012–13 school year). Pharr's anachronistic introduction sees all through the eyes of Augustus, reflecting the Servian and Suetonian focus that seems to be the ultimate source (2): The poem was undertaken at the request of Augustus. . . . Vergil and Augustus were both interested in thus giving divine sanction and the [End Page 115] weight of hoary antiquity to the measures which Augustus had undertaken for establishing the empire. Thus Augustus appears as the restorer of the good old days and good old ways of the fathers. He is the promised ruler of divine descent who is to bring peace and a return of the Golden Age to the whole world. On Virgil himself the ancient Life of Vergil is even more to the fore in Pharr's opining (3): As a piece of literature, the Aeneid has both the strengths and weaknesses of its author and subject matter. Vergil was a weakling, usually in poor health, shy to the point of painfulness, a sentimental idealist, and little acquainted with the hard and practical ways of the stern old Roman world. He was never married and seems to have cared little or nothing for feminine society. His one great ideal of life can be summed up in the word pietās, devotion, loyalty, and he equips his hero (pius Aenēās) with a full and overflowing measure of this quality, which finds its best expression in an unquestioned obedience to the will of the gods and to their more or less contradictory commands no matter how much human suffering may be entailed nor how much apparent wrong may result. Fortunately I missed out on all of this in school, so remained something of a tabula rasa on what the Aeneid was "about." As an undergraduate in New Zealand I took a course with W. R. Barnes on the Georgics, mostly book 4, I think it was, probably. That poem has always for me been the perfect poem; likewise it is a poem that came in my mind to sit easily and well with Harvard School readings of the epic that followed. Both poems deal in shadows as much as in light, and both—like the Eclogues—focus on losers as much as on winners: it is Meliboeus, Moeris, Lycidas, Orpheus and Eurydice, Dido and Turnus who get much of the music and whose fates linger along with the victories and successes of Tityrus, Aristaeus, and Aeneas. Barnes also introduced me to Steele Commager's 1966 edition, Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays, which contained the articles of Brooks, Clausen, and Parry, with other now-classic offerings such as Bernard Knox's "The Serpent and the Flame." It was one of the few books I brought with me to the U.S., though I seem to have lost it at some point. In graduate school at Michigan (1974-77) I read the Aeneid, or much of it, since it was on the reading list, and I did a Georgics seminar with D. O. Ross, Clausen's student at Harvard and...