Favorite Writers Research Articles

Antonio Candido Leitor de Marcel Proust: ou o Realismo como Teoria Literária

O presente artigo tem como objetivo interpretar a leitura empreendida por Antonio Candido daquele que para muitos foi seu escritor preferido, o francês Marcel Proust. Com o ensaio "Realidade e realismo" (via Proust) nosso crítico a partir do autor do Em busca do tempo perdido nos oferece uma modalidade sugestiva e singular de realismo enquanto teoria literária.

Reinventing Lives: A Conversation with Steven Carroll

Steven Carroll is the author of twelve novels, including two series; one based around his family background in Glenroy in suburban Melbourne, and the other inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I have admired Steven’s work ever since I reviewed The Time We Have Taken, his 2007 Miles Franklin Award winning novel, for the very first issue of Transnational Literature. This was the third of the ‘Glenroy’ novels – there are now six in that series, the latest being The Year of the Beast (2019), based on the experiences of his grandmother in Melbourne in 1917.Recently, when catching up on some long-overdue reading, I picked up A World of Other People (2013), the second of the Eliot novels, to discover that, although it is never made explicit in the book, the heroine is a reinvented version of another of my favourite writers, Iris Murdoch. I immediately decided it was time to travel to Melbourne (on the Overland train, which Steven’s father used to drive) to interview him.We met in late January 2019 in bustling Lygon Street, Carlton, where it was too noisy to record our conversation. We found a quiet, shady table nearby on the Melbourne University campus and talked for an hour, till the heat drove us back to Lygon Street to continue chatting over a cup of tea.

Remembering John L'Heureux

Remembering John L'Heureux Molly Antopol (bio) John L'Heureux, who died this past April, was an exquisite writer—to the very end; a master teacher; a deeply thoughtful man of faith; and a mentor, in the most profound sense of the word. He carried himself with more innate dignity than any person I have ever known—in his manner of speech, the ideas he imparted, even the way he dressed: always in newly shined shoes and an elegant sports coat. When he taught my workshop at Stanford, I'm pretty sure he was the only one in the classroom wearing gold cuff links. John also read more, knew more about, and better understood American Jewish literature than almost any other former Jesuit priest I know. I remember countless lunches with him, talking about Paley and Ozick and Pearlman and being awed by the depth of his understanding not only of their technical skills but of their experiences—for good and bad—as Americans and as Jews. Before I encountered Grace Paley's stories as an undergraduate, I had never before seen the older generations of my family depicted [End Page 773] on the page. She captured it all: the role of women in supposedly progressive movements, the way politics could seamlessly slide from the kitchen table to the playground and out into the world. Paley had utter compassion for every one of her characters. She was deeply funny without ever resorting to meanness. She wrote political stories, but they were never didactic. John intuited all that, but rather than simply praising her, he wanted to talk about how she accomplished these things. Prior to talking Paley with John, I felt I understood her because her characters were the closest I'd come to finding my relatives in literature. The more we talked, the clearer it became that John understood her work on a different level—he was engaging with it through a thorough exploration of what was happening on the page. And through our discussions I came to appreciate Paley less because her characters were recognizable to me and more for her impeccable craft—which John could parse with Talmudic nuance. At some point it occurred to me that if John could talk this way with me about my favorite writers, he could probably do the same with anyone else in the workshop about theirs. And he could. John spoke with erudition about Southern literature, Japanese fiction, European experimentalists, but especially, it turned out, about The Sopranos, a show he analyzed in minute—and brilliant—detail, and which he considered on par with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. John was my very first teacher when I arrived for the Stegner Fellowship in 2006, and I was incredibly nervous. When the director called with the news of my fellowship, my first thought was: this must be a mistake. She must have meant to call the other Molly Antopol. I was convinced everyone belonged in that room but me, that I was the one impostor there. But the moment I walked into that first workshop with John, the moment I understood how he ran the class—well, it would be a lie to say those impostor feelings [End Page 774] melted away; even now, thirteen years later, I still have them every day when I sit at my computer, but suffice to say they were quieted. John, of course, had a unique aesthetic in his own writing. Take, for example, the opening to his extraordinary story, "The Long Black Line," published last year in The New Yorker: Finn said an awkward goodbye to his parents and watched them drive off in the new Buick they had bought in case he changed his mind. They were pleased, of course, at Finn's decision to study for the priesthood, but they were wary, too. It was 1954, and priests were still thought to be holy, and Finn … well … Finn knew that he wasn't holy, but during a retreat in college he had succumbed to a fit of piety and, dizzied by the idea of sacrifice, applied to join the Jesuits. They had put him through a series of interviews, and let him know that...

Literature and writers in the life and works of Stanisław Moniuszko

The present article concerns the place and significance of literature in the life and works of Stanislaw Moniuszko, a composer who created different musico-literary genres, songs, operas, can- tatas as well as stage music for dramas. Moniuszko’s correspondence, which often featured litera-ture-related topics, constitutes the basis for the analysis of literary contexts of his works. The com- poser wrote about his favourite books, poets and writers as well as the lyrics to songs and librettos. Above all, however, his letters contain evidence of his search for new librettos in the existing liter- ary texts and numerous traces of his attempts to invite contemporary writers, poets and playwrights to collaborate on musico-dramatic works. The letters written to several eminent representatives of mid-century Polish literature are a testament to Moniuszko's ambitious intentions. The contents of those letters also confirm that it was difficult for the composer to find a writer who would collabo- rate with him as the author of the lyrics to a musico-dramatic piece. The article also presents a collection of Moniuszko's librettists, which includes the best writers and playwrights of the time. The most remarkable of Moniuszko's works are well-written in terms of lyrics, which is a proof of the effectiveness of the composer's efforts and, in the context of the popularity of his works, also of the significance of his achievements, not only for music, but also for the literature and literary culture of the nineteenth century.

Literatura i literaci w życiu i twórczości Stanisława Moniuszki

The present article concerns the place and significance of literature in the life and works of Stanislaw Moniuszko, a composer who created different musico-literary genres, songs, operas, cantatas as well as stage music for dramas. Moniuszko’s correspondence, which often featured literature-related topics, constitutes the basis for the analysis of literary contexts of his works. The composer wrote about his favourite books, poets and writers as well as the lyrics to songs and librettos. Above all, however, his letters contain evidence of his search for new librettos in the existing literary texts and numerous traces of his attempts to invite contemporary writers, poets and playwrights to collaborate on musico-dramatic works. The letters written to several eminent representatives of mid-century Polish literature are a testament to Moniuszko’s ambitious intentions. The contents of those letters also confirm that it was difficult for the composer to find a writer who would collaborate with him as the author of the lyrics to a musico-dramatic piece. The article also presents a collection of Moniuszko’s librettists, which includes the best writers and playwrights of the time. The most remarkable of Moniuszko’s works are well-written in terms of lyrics, which is a proof of the effectiveness of the composer’s efforts and, in the context of the popularity of his works, also of the significance of his achievements, not only for music, but also for the literature and literary culture of the nineteenth century.

Introduction

Introduction Jim Hicks SIGMUND FREUD ONCE offered an outline of the relations between poets and their dream-worlds. Unlike much of his work, his words on this subject still seem as rich and insightful as they must have appeared in December of 1907. For this issue, which celebrates our magazine's sixtieth year of publication, the psychoanalyst's observations are particularly relevant. The influence of history on the poetic imagination, Freud comments, "hovers, as it were, between three times—the three moments of time which our ideation involves." First, the imagination encounters "some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present"; from there, he notes, "it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience"; and finally,"it now creates a situation relating to the future." He concludes, "Thus past, present, and future are strung together, as it were, along the thread of the wish that runs through them." I'm fairly sure our founding editors never anticipated that their magazine would live to salute the third decade of this third millennium. I happen to have achieved the same age as our publication (a sum of years neither of my parents exceeded), and I certainly never expected to be around this long. And yet, for sixty years, the "thread of the wish" this magazine represents has never wavered: we promote social justice and equality, along with great art. We aim to provoke debate, inspire action, and expand understanding of the world around us. That's why, to celebrate our sixtieth anniversary, we decided to take Freud's words literally. We begin this issue with a "provoking occasion": major voices from two of the world's many hot spots. Looking across the globe today, one might well wonder where fires are not burning; in any case, Serhiy Zhadan's poetic dispatch from Ukraine, brought to us by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, much like Xu Xi's reflections on Hong Kong past and present, are surely not to be missed. After that, we've put together, not simply "the memory of an earlier experience," but a full, complex series of reflections on how we engage with memory and history, even in our most traumatic moments. Over the past half century or more, groundbreaking work on this subject has been done under the aegis of Holocaust Studies, and in this issue we bring you not only contributions from Laura Levitt and James Young, two key theorists of Holocaust and Jewish Studies, but also an essay by Ghislaine Dunant, Charlotte Delbo's biographer, which [End Page 584] discusses the unique contribution of the Auschwitz survivor's writing. To conclude this section, Patricia Chu applies the work of Holocaust studies to post–World War II literature by Asian American writers, and Peter Chametzky describes the implicit redefinition of citizenship that immigrant artists are bringing to contemporary Germany. The art of Anna Schuleit Haber resonates with each of the preceding arguments, capping this section perfectly. To complete its work, Freud notes, the poetic imagination must also "create a situation relating to the future"; in planning this issue, our editors realized that if we looked only to the past, our celebration would remain incomplete. Instead we invited a cohort of favorite writers from our past decade—winners of our Halley Prize for poetry as well as the authors of some of our favorite stories—to nominate emerging writers we hadn't yet published, authors whose work they felt belonged in our pages. Our friends, old and new, responded to our call, and we quickly faced an embarrassment of riches. As a result, the bulk of this anniversary issue—some eighteen poets and five writers of prose—looks out on the future, welcoming it here and now. We end our sixtieth year, and our sixtieth volume year, by reprinting a selection of work that first appeared online in a blog series launched in November 2016. For reasons obvious to all, during that moment of political crisis, we offered space to writers who would confront the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, the catastrophic social and environmental policies that, though the roots are surely deeper, have so thoroughly infested our public sphere during these past two years. From this series...

Interview with Umm Zakiyyaih

Umm Zakiyyah is one of the most prominent African-American Muslim writers writing about Muslims and Islam in the post-9/11 period. Her novels touch on the interfaith struggles of Muslims and Christians in a post-modern world and on the moral, spiritual and intercultural struggles of Muslims as minorities in a country where Muslims have been systematically marginalised after twin-tower attacks in 2001 and the subsequent American invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). She also writes about racism, women’s issues, the practice of Muslim women wearing headscarfs, and polygamy. In this interview, Umm Zakiyyah talks about her favourite writers, about the function of the writer in general, about the critical reception of her novels and about the influence of Islam on her imagination. She also addresses the issues of Islamophobia in the West, the future of Islamic fiction and questions pertaining to If I Should Speak and other novels.

Murder and Rape: Reading Flannery O’Connor alongside Eudora Welty

Murder and Rape: Reading Flannery O’Connor alongside Eudora Welty Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty are rarely talked about together, except perhaps in brief statements linking them as southern women writers.1 There is good reason for this, as they are very different types of writers, though both do struggle with a basic question: how does the writer communicate a sense of life’s mysteries, a sense of the ineffable and the transcendent? Exploring how the two writers approached this question, together with their quite different conceptualizations of the mysterious, provides a way to highlight their similarities as well as their differences. Also significant for both writers, though more so for O’Connor than for Welty, is the literary use of violence and the employment of extreme narrative strategies. As I will show, the literary use of violence is the most challenging and most troubling aspect of these two writers’ work, particularly in our increasingly violent era, and may for some readers finally be an insurmountable barrier for accepting each author’s imaginative vision—unless, that is, they are such diehard fans of the writer that they resist thinking through the unnerving implications of her work. O’Connor never swayed from her commitment to portray the world as she saw it as a believer. “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy,” she declares forthrightly in “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” adding that “this means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that. I don’t think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction” (804–05). O’Connor here lays out the key tenets of her fiction and of her position as a writer: that the ultimate meaning, no matter what the surface action, touches upon the divine; that there is no comfortable middle ground—you either make a choice for Christ or the Devil; and that, given the modern temper of unbelief, it is extremely difficult for her to communicate her stark religious vision. How to bridge the great divide she perceived between author and reader remained a central concern for O’Connor throughout her career, one that [End Page 89] she repeatedly agonized over and commented upon. She found no easy answers and she advocated various strategies for overcoming the divide. Over time two concepts became central to what she came to call her “Christian realism” (942). The first was that she had to depict the world as accurately as possible, not glossing over or ignoring aspects of life in order to create a rosy, feel-good view of Christian life and commitment. Drawing inspiration from two of her favorite writers, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, O’Connor came to see that only by depicting the visible world in all its fullness might the invisible world in all its mystery be glimpsed. Conrad, she notes in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” “was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one,” while James championed the idea that “the business of fiction [was] to embody mystery through manners” (“Nature” 80; “Teaching” 124). “The mystery [James] was talking about,” O’Connor observes in “The Teaching of Literature,” “is the mystery of our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery” (124). But revealing mystery by realistically portraying conventional manners, O’Connor realized, was not sufficient for communicating her vision to an unbelieving audience. O’Connor never aspired to be a southern Jane Austen. She knew that she needed to be more confrontational and disruptive, using tactics of narrative manipulation and distortion, what Christina Bieber Lake has chillingly termed O’Connor’s “shock and awe campaign” (27). Most of O’Connor’s readers know her famous comment from “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” that in writing to a largely unbelieving audience, writers of faith had to “make [their] vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and...

Teaching Stevens in and beyond the Book

Teaching Stevens in and beyond the Book Juliette Utard The point is that the hypertext, unlike the book, encourages greater decentralization . . . —Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality GIVEN THE BREVITY of my experience in teaching Wallace Stevens, and the straightforward conclusion it produced that I have learned much more from bringing his poetry into the classroom than I have actually taught, my thoughts will be less prescriptive than descriptive. Teaching Stevens today outside of the United States necessarily means reflecting on our position both as twenty-first-century readers casting a “backward glance” upon the past century’s literature and as European readers glancing across the Atlantic—something in the vein of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature yet wary of its exceptionalist underpinnings.1 The course I designed focused on “The Poetics and Politics of the American Poetry Book,” with Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Stevens’s Harmonium, and A. R. Ammons’s Garbage as the three core readings—three distinct poetry collections deploying their titular imagery around one governing metaphor for the book, architectural (with Crane), musical (with Stevens), and environmental (with Ammons). Can One Teach Stevens? My first serious experience in “Teaching Stevens” was a third-year elective course for a handful of English majors that was marked in the undergraduate syllabus as the “Poetry Option.” It took place two years ago in the Fall of 2015. Apart from the mandatory readings, students were asked to build their own individual research projects around one American poetry book not already on the syllabus: week after week they would deliver a brief update on their research, making (then defending) their final choice in a way that created a dynamic sense of unity within an otherwise miscellaneous group. I had, of course, previously exposed larger groups of students to individual poems by Stevens, each time with (relative) success—I remember the odd translation class in which students gleefully translated “The Snow Man” into French while I stood anxiously awaiting their [End Page 245] verdict, and one hour-long session of explication de texte (a highly structured form of close reading) entirely devoted to “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” both of them in the first years after I obtained my current position at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Never before 2015, however, had I been granted the opportunity of devoting more than an occasional class to my “favorite writer,” as Marielle Macé and Christophe Pradeau recently named those special literary figures who, for reasons often unaccountable or unavowed, accompany us through life. “‘The favorite writer,’” Macé and Pradeau write, “is a proper name that, for any period of time, any individual, or individuals, is simply enough, is fully satisfactory, amounts to literature, makes it possible to think about literature, and ultimately keeps alive a connection with literature that is at once sensitive, continuous, and recognized as entirely idiosyncratic.”2 Until recently, then, my encounters with Stevens in the classroom had been brief, improvised, and guilt-ridden. In part, this had to do with the kind of academic environment I was lucky enough to stage them in, one that privileges a core curriculum built around collegially approved literary works that students in years one, two, or three of their undergraduate English degree need to study before they can take the final examination—a mass ritual involving some three hundred students gathered in an amphitheater, pondering over the same text or essay question for several hours. In that context, adding one’s “favorite writer” to the common reading list just isn’t something any “one” can singlehandedly decide to do. Presumably, however, my anxiety also arose from what Jacqueline Vaught Brogan once identified as a quality of Stevens’s poetry that makes it unteachable or, to take up her words, “resistant to being taught”: “We can teach Yeats,” Brogan writes, “and we can teach Stein. . . . But I still believe it’s impossible to teach Wallace Stevens” (51). The “terror” that Milton Bates described in the same volume of essays seized me when at last I added Stevens to the reading list for my third-year American poetry class, an optional course designed as a stepping-stone toward graduate...

Angularity: An Interview with Leon Forrest

Leon Forrest was the author of four novels that effectively created an oral history of his mythical territory of Forrest County, which strongly resembles Chicago. In the first three works - There Is A Tree More Ancient Than Eden (1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (1977), and Two Wings to Veil My Face (1984) - he explored the spiritual core of African American experience through the blending of mythic, biblical, folk, and Shakespearean discourses. His last novel, Divine Days (1992), was consciously modeled on James Joyce's Ulysses in terms of its ambition to articulate the essence of a culture in a massive work designed, as Forrest phrases it in this interview, to be the Great World Novel. He also published a collection of essays, Relocations of the Spirit, in 1994. This interview was conducted in Chicago in 1995, roughly two years before Leon Forrest died of prostate cancer on November 6, 1997. Byerman: Since we're in Chicago, I'd like to focus for a moment on the importance of the city to your work. Especially with Divine Days, and to some extent your other works, the setting is very specific. Could it be set someplace else? Forrest: I don't know, because Chicago is the city that captures this kind of rowdy spirit that, it seems to me, has been missing so much from African American letters. This blend of the sacred and the profane seems to me to be so much a part of the Northern experience, particularly a city like Chicago with its great possibilities of going for broke. It's a hustler's town. You can make a comeback after falling, and people will let you up. It's not bound up by class differences in the black community the way other cities are. The idea of open-ended possibility in Chicago of the black community is really, to some degree, true of the muscularity of Chicago in a general way; in other literatures, it's mellow. Because of that, my fiction seems to me to be set uniquely in a kind of Chicago, though I always call it Forrest County work. The specific things - barbershops, bars, and churches - you can find those anyplace, but I hope they would have a certain Chicago character to them. Byerman: One of the things you mention in Relocations of the Spirit is the range of writers who have come from Chicago, who are associated with Chicago - Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Hayden, Cyrus Colter, Gwendolyn Brooks. Do you think there's something that these writers have in common that has to do with the city? Forrest: First of all, Hayden didn't come from Chicago - I just mention Hayden as a favorite writer - and Hansberry was a little too neat for the ethos of Chicago. Brooks is an outsider, and Colter is a transplanted guy from Indiana. It's really Bellow who is close to the outlandishness of Chicago, the sense of the hustler's town, the role of certain kinds of tricksters, the great humor of it. I think I'm more in that kind of tradition, much more than I would be to the tradition of another transplant, Richard Wright. (Laughter.) Byerman: I want to ask you about the idea of the voices in Divine Days. One of the things that struck me in reading through the book is that, while the characters are very different and their stories are very different, their voices seem to have a lot in common; that is, there seems to be this piling on of language and the playing with language (all the puns and other types of word play). Many of the significant voices in the text have this in common. Is there some sense in which they're all simply your voice? Forrest: Oh, no, not at all. I mean, I hope that each has his/her own coinage, but I obviously am attracted to certain kinds of characters who evolve in my artistic imagination who are great talkers, and there is a kind of tradition of an orchestrated oral tradition, in which you start off with A, move to C, move to E, and then come back and pick up B and D. That has to do with the way jazz moves, and the folk sermon and just general storytelling. …

The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire by Laura Claridge

Reviewed by: The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire by Laura Claridge Karin Roffman The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire. By Laura Claridge. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. In one of several striking passages in Laura Claridge’s engrossing new biography, an elderly, emaciated, and nearly blind Blanche Knopf undergoes emergency surgery in New York City, and appears to have finally reached the end of her drama-packed life. Yet, within twenty-four hours, she rebounds. Her husband, Alfred, who had left the hospital late in the evening fully expecting her to die, instead arrives in the morning to find her awake, miraculously talking, and “chipper.” (He, on the other hand, feels “pooped.”) Within a month of surgery, she is fashionably attired onstage and accepting an award. Within six months, she travels to London and Paris to meet with her favorite writers—while there, she falls, returns to the hospital in New York, flies back to finish her European trip—then commissions a book on the invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs as it is happening and returns to Washington, D. C., in time to meet with the potential author and to attend a conference of editors and publishers. Three countries, two hospitalizations, one award, and several book commissions covered within four breathless pages. The vivid, extravagant, feminist Knopf who materializes in these pages sheds her more well-known moniker, “Mrs. Alfred A. Knopf,” and reclaims her own: “Blanche.” By the end of the biography, there is no question that she is worth knowing not only as a fascinating figure of twentieth-century literary life, but also as one of its great protagonists. We can identify her as such in large part because she bought, shaped, and published the books by which we know that life. Reading is, in fact, the primary subject of the biography, for it was Blanche’s first, and probably only, consistent love. She was unquestionably more passionate about books than she was about marriage or motherhood. Her authors and their books were her children, and she knew instinctively how to nurture them so that they would flourish. She seems to have cherished but neglected her only son and felt betrayed when he finally left Knopf to form his own competing publishing house. Her psychological acuity, evident in her conversations with her authors and in her sensitivity to their words, needs, and desires (made manifest in her relationships with Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bowen, Albert Camus, and Thomas Mann), often deserted her at home. Her confidence in her own ideas—through a mind which she felt most deeply connected to while she was reading—also seemed to desert her when she was with her husband Alfred. He took full advantage of his higher status (in her eyes as well as his own) as an Educated Male. Self-educated and self-taught as a reader, editor, and publisher, Blanche spent most of her life trying to convince Alfred (and sometimes herself) that she was his equal. [End Page 144] Her authors, though, who knew her best as a reader, needed no such convincing. She read attentively and quickly, then hosted parties for writers and artists that crackled with verve, intelligence, and excitement. Next to reading was her love of music (extending to affairs with a remarkable list of the greatest twentieth-century soloists and conductors) and beautiful clothes, and among the international worlds of books, concerts, and fashion, she made friends everywhere. Her connections and the uses she made of them were crucial to the long-term success of the publishing house, but were dismissed by Alfred as the byproducts of an innate feminine charm rather than the good business they actually were. Alfred remained the official mouthpiece of Knopf for most of its formative years, and so the record of her remarkable achievement, like that of many women, was elided through those journalists complicit with his mode of self-promotion. Luckily, though, Claridge has recovered documentation of Blanche’s achievement through private documents—personal letters, unpublished diary pages, and interviews with her writers and employees—that attest to a truer history of the publishing house. These crucial...

Introduction to Focus: Erotic Poetry

Introduction to Focus:Erotic Poetry Anthony Madrid (bio) My guest editorship of this issue of American Book Review began with a modest piece called "Porn Poetry" posted on Paris Review Daily, 16th of August, 2016. There, I complain that we English-speakers have no substantial tradition of erotic poetry in our own language, if we define "erotic poetry" as poetical works whose primary aim is to sexually arouse the reader. My claim was that what we have instead is a small hill of material that might turn somebody on accidentally—merely because sexual themes are touched upon—but whose primary purpose is aggressive, satiric. This line of thought is not easily resisted, I think. Almost all the famous not-safe-for-work poetry in English treats sex as an inherently humbling business, and the nastiness and heartlessness with which the theme is handled reveals—so I asserted—a desire for a kind of revenge on sex itself. Most of my favorite writers are like this. Rochester, Swift, Beckett. I'll put it this way: For most Anglophone writers, "sex" and "piggishness" are near-synonyms. Naturally there are exceptions; I'm saying they're few. In 2002, a friend of mine brought a very special book to my attention. At the time, I was self-medicating with poetry a great deal, as I was preparing for my English Lit oral exams at the University of Chicago. I had a lot of reading to do, and my way of playing hooky from doing it was to type up poems I admired and e-mail them to my friends. The subject line always read "POETRY CHANNEL," along with the poem's title and the author's name and that of the translator (if applicable). Also the date when the piece was written. My admittedly flexible ideal was to send my friends poems they could not possibly have seen otherwise, because the works were, for example, buried in hundred-year-old publications of ethnographic societies, or scholarly books about the place of Buddhism in the poet's life, and so on. Erotic material was not common, but I do remember sending a provocative selection from a book called The Bedbugs' Night Dance and Other Hopi Tales of Sexual Encounter (1995). Somebody might imagine this latter item, drawn from a particularly rich fund of traditional Native American storytelling, would escape my objection about sexually themed literature being so frequently a way of processing anxiety. But that person would be about as wrong as wrong could be. The stories, told in beautiful deadpan, are hilarious precisely because of the ways they make the audience squirm with discomfort. I urge anyone who doubts what I am saying to order the book—it costs nothing, online—and read the story called "Horned Lizard Family." But to get back to the special book my friend recommended. It's called Not Far from the River: Poems from the Gāthā Saptaśati (1990), translated by David Ray. Ian told me about it, not as a remedy for any of the concerns I'm talking about here, but rather simply as a good read for anybody with a lively interest in foreign poetry. The book is a free translation of more than 300 erotic epigrams, originally composed in Mahārāṣṭri Prākṛt, the ancestor of modern Marathi. All the poems are four lines long. They are all about situations and body parts and taxonomy and longing. But mainly situations and body parts. The book fucked me up for life. Over and over I tell young poets: "Please write this book. Or something just like it. Write a book that will do people some actual good. . . ." The main thing is the angle. It's not satirical. The poems are not a way of processing fear and disgust. Instead, each one is simply a generous hand-off to the reader, from the poet, of some gem of erotic imagination. There is no way to do it justice with a few snippets, but I have to give you something: Rare sight, a woman lost in the trance,making love. Beautiful—so long as her eyesremain open, like blue of...

Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2015–2016

Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2015–2016 Catherine H. Chengges This checklist is based on current listings in on-line bibliographies and research done through Carlson Library at the University of Toledo. Useful databases included Ebsco (Academic Search Complete), FirstSearch (ArticleFirst, WorldCat, WorldCat Dissertations and Theses), and ProQuest (DAI). 1. Bibliographies Chengges, Catherine H. "Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2014–2015." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 173–79. Print. 2. Books Cole, Susan Letzler. Serious Daring: The Fiction and Photography of Eudora Welty and Rosamond Purcell. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2016. Print. Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Eudora Welty: Nine Photographs of Talking 2. Photography in Fiction 3. The Visualizing Mind 4. Doubling 5. Reverberations 6. Rosamond Wolff Purcell: Beginnings 7. Alchemy 8. Double Vision 9. Foraging and Reconfiguring 10. Images Rich and Strange 11. Wonder Epilogue Notes Bibliography [End Page 141] Pollack, Harriet. Eudora Welty's Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2016. Print. Acknowledgments Preface. On Accidental Education and Reading the Body Introduction. Written on the Symbolic Body: Reading the Pattern of the Other Woman Understanding the Body of the Other Woman Other Women's Bodies in Welty's "Girl Stories": Ladies, Flashers, and the Daring Escape of Female Sheltering Welty's Photography and the Other Woman Silence, Sheltering, and Exposure in "Music from Spain" and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories: Eudora Welty in John Robinson's Closet Controversies in "Welty Criticism": Figuring the Body Was Welty a Feminist? Wild-Haired Maternity, the Freak Body, and Comedy "Before the Indifferent Beak Could Let Her Drop": Interrogating Rape—Comic and Otherwise—in Welty's Fiction The Body of the Other Woman and the Performance of Race: What Welty Knew Postscript. A Last Word on Continuity and Change in Welty's Career Notes Bibliography Index 3. Works by Welty Dyne, Sarah. "Of Memory, Place, and Friendship: Eudora Welty's Unpublished Review of Bowen's Court." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 13–20. Print. McHaney, Pearl Amelia. "Eudora Welty's 1985 Reading of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 31–44. Print. Welty, Eudora. "Review of Bowen's Court (Reissue 1979)." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 21–30. Print. [End Page 142] 4. Articles Edwards, Bridget. "Eudora Welty House and Garden." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 144–47. Print. Eichelberger, Julia. "Eudora Welty Society." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 147–49. Print. Galey, Forrest. "The Eudora Welty Collection." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 149–56. Print. Gros, Emmeline. "Manhood in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding (1946): Masterly, or Simply Mastered?" Babel: Littérature plurielles: The Masculine South 31.1 (2015): 39–61. Print. Hudder, Cliff. "Race, Nature, and Decapitation in Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green.'" Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 45–67. Print. [Winner of the 2015 Ruth Vande Kieft Prize awarded by the Eudora Welty Society] Kaplan, David. "Eudora Welty Biennial 2017." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 156–57. Print. Kolin, Philip C. "Southern Music, Photography, Art, Fiction, Foodways, and Poetry." Southern Quarterly 52.2 (Winter 2015): 5–9. Print. [Introduction to issue] Luckett, Jeanne B. "Eudora Welty Foundation." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 139–44. Print. Madden, Kerry. "Interview with Antonya Nelson." PMS Poemmemoirstory 14 (2015): 183–93. Print. [Welty discussed as a favorite writer] Marrs, Suzanne. "A Tribute to William Jay Smith." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 9–11. Print. [Tribute to Welty friend] McHaney, Pearl A. "Meanwhile There Are Letters: Interview with Suzanne Marrs." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 133–38. Print. ——. "A Tribute to Timothy Seldes." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 5–8. Print. [Tribute to Welty agent] ——. "A Tribute to William Jay Smith." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 9–11. Print. [Tribute to Welty friend] ——. "A Tribute to William U. McDonald, Jr." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): 1–4. Print. [Tribute to founding editor of Eudora Welty Newsletter] ——. "User's Guide." Eudora Welty Review 8 (Spring 2016): ix–x. Print. Millichap, Joseph R. "Eudora Welty, Photography, and Southern Narratives." The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the...

Hoff mann’s Works in the Art of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky

E.T.A. Hoffmann was a favorite writer of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, but Hoffmann’s works have never become the subject of a special study as Dobuzhinsky’s lite - rary sources of creativity yet. This determines the relevance of this article. Impressions from reading masterpieces of liter ature played an important role in the works of Russian artists of the late 19th — early 20th century. The scientifi c novelty of this article lies in the fact that it is the fi rst undertaken experience in analyzing the impact of the works of Hoffmann on the art of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky. The author used a complex method that combined the source analysis of the artist’s memoirs, the traditional formal analysis of his works, and the analysis of the texts of Hoffmann’s novels and short stories. The method allowed to expand and deepen the existing notions of the art of Dobuzhinsky, which had been created just on the basis of traditional formal analysis of his works. The article reveals that the experience of reading Hoffmann’s novel “The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr”, as well as his short stories “The Golden Pot” and “The Corner Window”, infl uenced the fi gurative decision and choice of artistic sources (primarily, Japanese prints of the 18th—19th centuries) for a number of Dobuzhinsky’s artworks: illustrations to the works of Alexei Remizov and Mikhail Kuzmin, views of Saint Petersburg, views of some streets of Saint Petersburg.

Acceptance and Transformation of Mythologies in the Edo Period Literature - Focused on Saikaku’s Narratives, a Favorite Writer at the Era -

Acceptance and Transformation of Mythologies in the Edo Period Literature - Focused on Saikaku’s Narratives, a Favorite Writer at the Era -

Jorge Luis Borges en Danilo Kiš o la lección intertextual

Few authors of the 20th century have had such a remarkable influence on the literature of other writers as Jorge Luis Borges. The impact of his works can be appreciated in all important national literatures; many writers have recognized his expertise and influence, some of them openly imitating him. In this respect, literature written in Serbo- Croatian is a special case, with a huge reception of his literature. The Borges “wave” arrived late to Yugoslavia, but with increased strength, and from the 1970s on the Argentinean author has remained one of the favourite writers amongst young readers. Local writers quickly absorbed all the aesthetic and conceptual developments of the author of Ficciones, even giving birth to a new trend called “Borgesian prose” which has given the world such remarkable authors as Milorad Pavic. Although not considered strictly a borgesist, Danilo Kis, one of the internationally best known Serbian authors, deserves special attention. Much of his work is marked in many ways by Borgesian stylistic and thematic influences. Numerous intertextualities make some of his texts a genuine dialogue with the Argentinean master. However, the high quality, originality and diversity of Kis’s work distinguish the Serbian author from the rest of the Balkan Borges’ followers. The present paper reviews the influences, references, allusions, appropriations and other intertextual links to Borges’ literature that can be found in works by Kis, from his first novels, where the influence is more subdued, through numerous references in A tomb for Boris Davidovich, to the already clearly Borgesian stories of The Encyclopaedia of the Dead.

Reading 21st-Century Southern Fiction

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When we asked some of our favorite writers, scholars, and literary critics for their thoughts on the state of southern fiction, many demurred that they didn't know the field well enough to comment. By definition, 21C fiction includes only novels and short stories published since January 1, 2000; the more cautious among us might argue that it's too soon to judge this field with any certainty. Untitled wall study, by Kenny Cole, 2010, courtesy of the artist. When we asked some of our favorite writers, scholars, and literary critics for their thoughts on the state of southern fiction, many demurred that they didn't know the field well enough to comment. By definition, 21C fiction includes only novels and short stories published since January 1, 2000; the more cautious among us might argue that it's too soon to judge this field with any certainty. We understand these sentiments, but with all due respect to Faulkner and friends, we wanted this special issue to focus on what was fresh and new in southern letters. For me, this was a labor of love, culminating almost a decade after moving to Chapel Hill to study southern literature, that move itself a dream long deferred. question of what qualifies as southern fiction--or southern literature more broadly--has long vexed literary critics. In 1930, Howard Mumford Jones grilled Donald Davidson, one of the self-styled Fugitive Poets, about Davidson's essay on The Trend of Southern Literature because, as Jones complained, You nowhere explicitly state what it is you mean by the southern quality of Southern literature. Davidson declined to supply a definition. (1) Standard descriptions of what makes southern literature and culture distinctive (if not exceptional) are by now familiar to most bibliophiles: an insistent sense of place; the strong influences of family, community, and religion; rural and agrarian folkways; an obsession with history and/or the past (read: slavery and its legacies--Civil War, segregation, and racial strife); the gothic and grotesque; biscuits, grits, barbecue, collards, sweet tea, and moonshine; moonlight and magnolias; the list goes on and on. But such symbols of southernness are fraught with stereotypes, and they rarely tell the whole story. In 1996, Jerry Leath Mills suggested (with tongue-in-cheek, but citing an impressive array of examples) that southern literature could be identified by a single litmus test: Is there a dead mule in it? Mills categorized over 200 literary examples of dead mules, or Equus caballus x asinus (defunctus), by the mules' various causes of death--including overwork, beating, drowning, asphyxiation, being hit by trains, falling into subterranean caves, and many more. But these days a good mule is hard to find, so we turn to more abstract and hopefully less morbid strategies for surveying the field. In this issue's Twenty, Twenty-One roundtable feature, writers and critics offer their own weird and wonderful assessments of southern literature in the present moment. (2) For far too long, southern literature was considered the exclusive province of wealthy white men, even though women and people of color have been in the and writing about it for at least as long. Early anthologies of southern literature were overwhelmingly populated with works by white male writers that generally supported the Agrarians' view of southernness as a rural and autochthonous culture that sprang naturally from southern soil. But by the onset of the twenty-first century, the South Region contained the largest percentage of the U.S. population (with 35.6 percent of all residents, regardless of citizenship status; the Midwest Region was second with 22.8 percent), and 72.8 percent of the South's population was categorized as urban. Moreover, only 65.7 percent of these southerners racially identified as White alone, or white and non-Latino. …

Look to the Ladies

22 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2016 crime & mystery WORLDLIT.ORG 23 T his summer the British Library held another of its highly successful Bodies from the Library days celebrating the Golden Age of crime fiction. We had papers on Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, and Georgette Heyer (her crime, not her Regency, novels), all favorite writers of mine, plus papers on male detective novelists. The only one I’d heard of was G. K. Chesterton with his Father Brown stories. The following week in Waterstones, I saw a new set of Josephine Tey’s crime novels. I started thinking about the longevity of the female Golden Age crime novelists. Over the last twelve years, Vintage has republished most of Margery Allingham. Agatha Christie has never been out of print, nor has Dorothy L. Sayers. Why have the Golden Age female crime novelists survived to enjoy a renaissance , where the males have not? I was nudged toward an answer by Martin Edwards’s excellent book, The Golden Age of Murder, a study of the founding of the Detection Club in 1930 and its members during the period up to 1949. Created by Anthony Berkeley Cox, one of the leading detective novelists of the period, it provided a social network and support for crime writers he admired. Of the forty-one members elected between 1930 and 1949, there were twenty-nine men and twelve women. Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the founding members; so was Agatha Christie. Margery Allingham was elected in 1934. The detective novel rose to popularity in the 1920s, in a society with a passion for games and game playing, and detective novels of the period provided “puzzles.” Authors presented situations that seemed impossible , “locked-room mysteries” abounded, and readers pitted their wits against the author. One of the foremost proponents was John Dickson Carr, whose The Hollow Man (1935; US title: The Three Coffins) presents three puzzles in one story, all seemingly impossible, until Dr. Fell sweeps aside the illusions and trickery and presents the solution . It is perhaps the acme of the “puzzle” detective novel. American crime writer S. S. Van Dine wrote, “The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more—it is a sporting event.” In 1928 he drew up a list of “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories .” In 1929 Ronald Knox, a founding member of the Detection Club, produced a somewhat shorter list. The rules were mainly founded on the “fair play” principle , such as insisting that the detective shared clues with the reader­ —and that the detective was not to have committed the murder. It was said to be an attempt to legitimize detective fiction as a respectable literary genre. Detective novelists played lip service to the “rules” and almost immediately proceeded to break them (see WLT, Nov. 2015, 16­ –18). Detective novels of the 1920s concentrated on the investigator assessing details of the crime and the “unbreakable” alibi of the prime suspect. Floor plans, clocks that were fast or slow, hidden passages, and secret rooms often featured. “How” the murder was committed was often more important than why or by whom. I began reading crime fiction at an early age. My mother would ask me to choose her reading matter from the local library. She liked detective novels, and eventually I started to read them myself. Mother liked Agatha Christie, but I am sorry to say that I found her stories simplistic. I returned to her after I started writing crime novels myself and was taken aback by the fluidity of her writing, her ability to set out story and characters in a way that seemed simple and entertaining but in fact concealed a fiendishly clever plot. The book that grabbed me was Gaudy Night (1935), by Dorothy L. Sayers. It’s the tale of a campaign of poison-pen letters and other disturbing events in an Oxford college. Unusually for a crime novel, murder is narrowly avoided. I was captivated by the relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane and the tensions in the college atmosphere. I began to read Sayers’s other books. Then I lit on Margery Allingham. I first read Look to the Lady...

Space and spaces

The idea of space is central in the way we think. We organize our perceptions in physical space, we think of time as a one-dimensional continuum, and we carry spatial notions over to any number of our conceptual constructs. Nevertheless, in some sense space is ‘our’ technology, wonderfully evolved for dealing with our experience of the physical world. It is probably only an approximation to reality. Long ago I happened to be looking at an account of quantum field theory written ‘for the general reader’ by Freeman Dyson, one of my favorite writers about science. I came upon a passage where he said that there are ‘well-understood mathematical reasons’ why when we quantize a wave-like physical system such as the electromagnetic field the result is best described in terms of particles. “Unfortunately,” he added, “the reason for this cannot be explained in non-mathematical terms.” I felt rather let down, for I don’t like the idea of mathematics as an arcane mystery where even the basic ideas can only be explained to initiates. I also wondered exactly which well-understood mathematical reasons Dyson had in mind. I have thought about the question a lot since then, but haven’t come up with anything that would be of much use to non-mathematicians; I leave it as a challenge. It seems to me a challenge even to give a clear mathematical account. I suppose that Dyson was thinking of the traditional statement that a free field can be regarded as a system of independent harmonic oscillators — which mystified me so much when I first encountered it in physics lectures as an undergraduate — but I believe that to understand the essential point involves thinking carefully about how we use the concept of space. That is the aim of this talk.

Selected Essays of Malcolm Bowie, I: Dreams of Knowledge; II: Song Man

Malcolm Bowie, a brilliant interdisciplinary scholar who was at the centre of French studies in Britain in the three decades leading up to his death in 2007, at the age of 63, taught at UEA, Cambridge, London, and Oxford, and among many other achievements served as General Editor of French Studies from 1980 to 1987. His hugely influential and widely read books on Michaux, Mallarmé, Proust, Lacan, and on literary theory and psychoanalysis continue to inform critical debate and are admired for the combination of qualities that characterize his work: cultural breadth, close attention to the text, theoretical sophistication, and stylistic panache. Only someone with Bowie's exquisite powers of expression and formidably focused, well-stocked mind could home in so closely on the multilevelled play of thought in some of the most difficult modern writers, and especially on the places where their work crosses aesthetic boundaries. The core of his critical achievement was to offer his readers ringside seats as he demonstrated how Mallarmé's poem Un Coup de dés made contingency visible on the page, or how Proust's narrator turned jealousy into a form of epistemology. It is therefore a huge treat to be able to revel in the publication of his Selected Essays, impeccably edited by Alison Finch and beautifully produced by Legenda, which collect previously published (there are no inédits) but widely scattered publications. The first volume, Dreams of Knowledge, comprises five essays on Proust, six on Mallarmé, one each on Valéry and Éluard, and five on psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, and Winnicott). This bald summary gives no idea of the teeming interdisciplinary richness of the volume's contents, for reasons that are clearly in evidence in a late essay placed as a ‘Prelude’. ‘Remembering the Future’, a contribution to an anthology of writings on memory edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and A. S. Byatt, is quintessential Bowie in its forthright insistence on the ‘desire-driven’ character of great art, which always deals in futures as much as in pasts. Against the ‘delusional and demeaning’ stamp of ‘modern nostalgia’ he pinpoints the exuberant and affirmative play between creativity and tradition, the ‘migrations into the future’ (p. 13) he detects in Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, Titian's Perseus and Andromeda, poems by Shakespeare and Ungaretti. One of the factors that make Bowie a great critic is that to read him is an education in itself (and one that makes the reader feel more intelligent, as well as illuminated and energized, whatever the topic). As a rule, the essays collected here broaden the angle of vision on his favourite writers. Those on Proust involve painting, life-writing (a remarkable survey embracing Plutarch, St Jerome, Chaucer, and Augustine), psychoanalysis, brevity, and the device of superimposition as adumbrated in a remark by Walter Benjamin. Those on Mallarmé focus on the sea (and Debussy), Hegel, and eschatology. Those on psychoanalysis invoke Rilke (in connection with Winnicott), Mahler, and Marienbad (a keen sense of place is one of Bowie's trademarks).