Harold Bloom Research Articles

More than a Period Piece: Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls as a Reflection of the Spanish Civil War

This article addresses the possibility of interpreting For Whom the Bells Tolls (1940. London: Marshall Cavendish) not merely as a novel of the Spanish Civil War, but also as a text that provides insights beyond the limits of that historical event itself. Several episodes of the novel are considered, and biographical and historical aspects of the author's concerns are interrogated in order to understand the novel's wider significance.The article explores a claim made by Harold Bloom regarding the current significance of Ernest Hemingway's work, in order to establish the relevance of the text for modern readers.

Wordsworth after Milton: Paradise Lost and Regained in “Nutting”

In “Nutting,” which is comprised of a tissue of allusions to Paradise Lost , William Wordsworth carries on a sustained though enigmatic conversation with his great predecessor John Milton. The speaker in the poem describes a recollected boyhood episode of raiding a bower of hazel trees in terms borrowed from Milton’s descriptions of the tempter Satan and the tempted Eve and Adam. Wordsworth rewrites and internalizes in a compressed lyric space the drama played out in Paradise Lost , choosing a narrative in which the individual falls without external provocation, as both ravager and ravaged. Attention to the Miltonic elements in “Nutting” suggests, pace Harold Bloom, that, far from experiencing an “anxiety of influence” as he contemplates Milton, Wordsworth finds the example of Milton uniquely enabling, to the extent that assimilation of Milton’s poetry becomes for Wordsworth a condition of writing poetry. What Wordsworth inherits from Milton is, the essay argues, a deep balance of delight and sadness, of joy and sorrow, a balance arising from the sense that the world in which we live is at once a place of exile from paradise and a paradisal home.

“Some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor”: On Violent Contagion and Apocalyptic Logic in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark

Research Article| May 01 2015 “Some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor”: On Violent Contagion and Apocalyptic Logic in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark Markus Wierschem Markus Wierschem University of Paderborn, Germany Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Contagion: Journal of Violence Mimesis and Culture (2015) 22: 185–202. https://doi.org/10.14321/contagion.22.1.0185 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Markus Wierschem; “Some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor”: On Violent Contagion and Apocalyptic Logic in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. Contagion: Journal of Violence Mimesis and Culture 1 May 2015; 22 185–202. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/contagion.22.1.0185 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressContagion: Journal of Violence Mimesis and Culture Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Souls at the White Heat

Souls at the White Heat Daniel T. O’Hara (bio) The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime Harold Bloom Spiegel and Grau www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books 544 Pages; Print. $35.00 What the daemon knows is, of course, literary greatness and the American sublime. So what is the daemon? It is that creative power which arises when writing and reading that transports us beyond the everyday self. Author and reader become amalgamated (but not one), in the moment of vision, which is a passage marked by imaginative genius. So great is this experience of knowing (and being known, as Bloom has taught us), that it feels like we tap into another realm of, perhaps even beyond, being. This uncanny, and often terrifying recognition, following Longinus’s lead, is “the sublime tribunal” of judgment: “more, less than, incommensurate.” Bloom, borrowing here primarily from Orphic myths, presents this sublime knowledge of our own divinity in the figure of the daemon: the poet as poet. We often feel that such power is borrowed or stolen. Guilt at not being able to reciprocate can accumulate to paralyze, so built up to become resentment at others’ gifts, and self-destruction of one’s own. This complex belief is no organized religious faith, but is a creative fiction known to be a fiction, composing a rough ethics of revisionary reading. One of the lasting healing effects of Bloom’s work, however, is that this distinction between reading and writing, between mere passive reception and active creative imagination, can no longer be made with categorical certainty. However, in particular instances, we must make them. We thereby read in thanks, due to Bloom, with a greater sense of life within us, even as we read without softening illusion about the costs of ecstatic flights. The Daemon Knows consists of six large “chapters,” pairing twelve incontestably great American writers, as follows: Whitman and Melville, Emerson and Dickinson, Hawthorne and James, Twain and Frost, Stevens and Eliot, Faulkner and Hart Crane. I use scare quotes around “chapters” because when the longest is 120 plus pages in print, a chapter is more like a small book. To his credit and the reader’s enlightenment, Bloom keeps connecting his authors, looking ahead, back and forth, via both critical remarks but also many personal ones, which connect not only these authors to each other, but his life and his conversations with other critics, especially Kenneth Burke and Angus Fletcher (two of my own favorites). The reader, in this fuller way, thus feels capable of also connecting to his or her own life of reading. The most extraordinary thing about the book is that, in writing about figures he has often discussed, Bloom gives us new insights. Whether it fits neatly with what he has said before matters not. What matters is the cast of new insights. No foolish consistencies haunt him. We see a great critic, who is in his mid-eighties, animatedly at work learning anew. In following him, we can also incorporate both the particular insight and the greater lesson of being open to such humanistic continuities. For instance, Bloom changes his mind about figures, including T. S. Eliot, whom he admits into his personal pairings (Bloom refuses the term “canon,” rightly, given that idea’s distractions). Reading “Little Gidding,” the last of Four Quartets, he celebrates Eliot’s achievement in the “familiar compound ghost” section, even as he concludes by condemning him, despite his “daemonic gift,” for his Anti-Semitism and misogyny. The Daemon Knows is so copious, Rabelaisian in this respect, I cannot hope to encompass its new riches. The long first part on Whitman and Melville alone is filled with them and is sure to inspire many other critics’ books. But I can give some taste of them by what is a return for me to Emily Dickinson, about whom I once wrote for a special journal issue devoted to “revising the tradition.” In “‘The Designated Light’: Irony in Emily Dickinson,” I was inspired to do so by Bloom’s two-week visit to the university where I then happened to be an assistant professor. Along with giving two...

The Invention of Influence by Peter Cole (review)

Reviewed by: The Invention of Influence by Peter Cole Michael Cherlin (bio) Peter Cole, The Invention of Influence (New Directions Books, 2014), xvi + 121 pp. Poets, like other artists as they grow, return to the concerns that made them poets (painters, composers, and so on) in the first place. Those who are fortunate find the capacity to augment and transform their earlier selves. Those whose luck has run out, repeat themselves with ever diminishing capacity. Peter Cole is, as Tyndale characterized St. Joseph, a lucky fellow. The first line of the first poem in Peter Cole’s first volume of poetry reads: A way cut to the letter: This initiatory poem is entitled Alphabet, and as befits a poet and translator of poetry, the cut of letters and words is never far from Cole’s central concerns. In the opening line of Alphabet, the cut is made palpable by the caesura, white on the page, separating the black letters that stride it side by side. Cole, in addition to his remarkable work as a poet, is the preeminent translator of Hebrew poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, as well as poetry from the wide-ranging tradition collectively known as Kabbalah. The separation of being cut away, emblematic of birth, is central to creation stories in both Gnosticism and Kabbalah, the unknowable Divine separated out from the universe of creation, the Divine spark within each of us separated out from whence we came. One of the Kabbalistic creation stories tells that the Torah was created before the rest of creation; it is the blueprint for all there is. “A way cut” is a way of making, and the cut of the way comes from the letters themselves, charged with the endless productivity of creation. “To the letter” is just so, every tittle and dot having meaning. This is the stuff that poetry is made of. The sources for Cole’s earlier poetry include Jewish tradition, but the American voice that I hear most prevalently, remembered and transformed, [End Page 285] is that of A. R. Ammons, the Ammons of Corsons Inlet and Sphere: The Form of a Motion. So far as I can perceive, the echoes of Ammons disappear in the later work. Speech’s Hedge is the first major sequence in Cole’s second book of poetry, Hymns & Qualms. Here I find glimmerings of John Hollander as precursor, an aspect of Cole’s poetry that Harold Bloom discusses in his brilliant and moving introduction to the new book. The “hedge” has several dimensions including hedging our bets, placing ourselves somewhere in between the adoration of “hymns” and the skepticism of “qualms.” But first and foremost, it is a setting apart. The first injunction in Pirkei Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”), the most central book of rabbinic ethics and another recurrent theme in Cole’s poetry, is: “Be deliberate in judging, and raise up many disciples, and make a hedge for the Torah.” Like “a way cut,” the hedge is a separation that opens onto a bewildering range of poetic meanings. Within the sequence we read: Words are wood for the vanished altar:Isaac the son who brings his own kindling. The wood, now words, is cut to prepare a sacrifice: the story of Isaac is yet another recurrent source of wonder for Cole, Abraham’s son doomed to sacrifice and then saved by the intervention of God’s angel, a test for Abraham, famously reticent throughout the episode (or is his anguish suppressed, repressed?), Isaac providing the words, innocent queries to his father, not knowing what was planned, and neither father nor son knowing the reversals of fortune to come in the immediate future or through the vicissitudes of millennia. The question of “what has been prepared,” a question that includes traces of the story of Isaac, becomes the title of a sequence in Cole’s third book of poems, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. The sixth section of that sequence, “What Is Meant by Being,” asks a series of questions, the beginning of which I show below (the ellipses are mine). What is meant by being bound? As one who boards a train? Or she whose...

Anxieties of influence

A defining feature of retranslation is that a previous translation exists, and this earlier text has a first translator. In this article we argue that the figure of the first translator exerts an influence in the retranslation process, and all retranslators are forced to develop a stance towards the predecessor. Taking Harold Bloom’s notion of anxiety of influence in poetry as a starting point, we look at two cases of retranslation that share the same famous first translator, Pentti Saarikoski, analysing how and where the voice of this first translation can be heard in the retranslations. According to Bloom’s taxonomy, there are six modes available to poets. Applying the same taxonomy to our two retranslators, we find that they have resorted to different modes. What remains constant is that the figure of the first translator is an unavoidable function of the retranslation process and needs to be taken into account both by the retranslator and by researchers studying retranslations.

Cary Nelson The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American PoetryThe Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+716.

<i>Cary Nelson</i> The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American PoetryThe Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+716.

El canon en la narrativa contemporánea del Caribe y del Cono Sur ed. by Rita De Maeseneer, Ilse Logie (review)

Reviewed by: El canon en la narrativa contemporánea del Caribe y del Cono Sur ed. by Rita De Maeseneer, Ilse Logie Will H. Corral De Maeseneer, Rita and Ilse Logie, eds. El canon en la narrativa contemporánea del Caribe y del Cono Sur. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2014. 349pp. Little of substance has been written about the Latin American canon as a whole, and with few exceptions the contributors to this volume accurately dissect and parse that state of the art to produce this judicious volume. Only [End Page 329] scholars of the recognition, expertise, and ultimately accumulated wisdom that De Maeseneer and Logie exhibit can put together studies that, while limiting themselves to a seemingly implausible linkage of the Caribbean and the Southern Cone, make assertions, discover connections, and open interpretative possibilities useful for greater, objective discussions of other canons. De Maeseneer, an amply recognized master interpreter of Caribbean literatures and cultures, and Logie, a solid reader of River Plate narrative, carefully plot the logic of El canon en la narrativa contemporánea, each contributor demonstrating the need to distinguish accurately between endless theoretical discussions or routine exegetical arrangements from lasting and inspiring readings and works. It is particularly edifying that the last section, “Antonio José Ponte, Alejandro Zambra y el canon” is devoted to a conversation and articles about two of the most important prose writers at this century’s start. Eleven years and greater international reception separate the younger Zambra from the equally stimulating Ponte, both boldly distancing themselves from their cohort’s received ideas and canon, which is also a thread for these carefully edited essays. That section is preceded by four on “Reflexiones generales,” “El canon con mayúscula,” “Géneros cuestionados,” and “Antologías” that are intrinsically novel approaches to the eternally irresolute problem of the canon. They thus provide timely and necessary assessments that incidentally coincide with the growing Anglophone critical recovery of the term after the unintended harm inflicted by Harold Bloom’s misconceptions about the Latin American part of his call to arms. To their and the editors’ great credit these articles do not take their cues from those appeals. The first two sections are mainly devoted to Southern Cone literatures, while the third and fourth are primarily devoted to Caribbean narrative. It is “mainly” and “primarily” so because, wisely, some of the contributors posit how the literatures of apparently different demographic spaces have much more in common that is generally perceived or assumed, even by specialized readers. That idea is perceptively pursued in De Maeseneer’s and Logie’s excellent and too modestly titled introduction, “Narrativa contemporánea y canon: una contribución al debate.” That said, the three articles in “Reflexiones generales” endeavor to combine aesthetics and politics, and José Amícola’s is most illuminating in that regard, since he is succinct and extremely successful in summarizing the aesthetic debate; while Ana María Amar Sánchez is at pains to politicize an earlier period of Argentine narrative. Liesbeth François’s article is very well informed and conceptualized but ultimately undermined by her choice of sample, since there are no real signs that authors like Sergio Chejfec or better exponents of his idea of the canon are [End Page 330] near approaching that status in their narrative, in post-César Aira Argentina or elsewhere. The most fascinating aspect of the first two essays in the second section is how, while nominally devoted to the “major canon,” Magdalena Perkoswka and Marta Waldegaray respectively renew views on Borges and Sarmiento’s canonicity in terms of comparatively less influential writers like Tomás Eloy Martínez and Tununa Mercado, although the former certainly has had a major presence in the rest of Latin America. Waldo Pérez’s concentration on Orígenes to fine tune questions of identity, tradition, and the archive in the Cuban canon are well taken, but could have been strengthened by engagement with problematic views of the national archive, like those of Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Roberto González Echevarría, and others. “Géneros cuestionados” includes two magnificent articles, a persuasive and seminal essay on the art of the diatribe by Stéphanie...

Sabina Berman Redux: Adaptation and the Anxiety of (Self)Influence

Adaptation is bit like redecorating. Alfred Uhry SINCE 2012 and premiere of El narco negocia con Dios, there has been considerable fanfare over Sabina Berman's return to theatre after decade of devoting her energies to film, television, narrative, and cultural politics. Yet, unknown to all but her most devout followers, this return to theatre has primarily entailed of obscure little play that she wrote in 1994: El gordo, la pajara y el narco. In fact, during past twenty years, Berman has adapted and staged this one-act piece three times and with three different titles: Krisis (1997), El narco negocia con Dios (2012), and Tic Tac Boom! (2013). Nonetheless, this particular instance of Berman redux is not due to monetary motives or inertia, but rather constitutes response to both changes and lack of changes that have taken place on Mexico's political and social stage during past two decades. Theories proposed by Linda Hutcheon, Marvin Carlson, Julie Sanders, Richard Dawkins, and others elucidate meaning of adaptation itself in Berman's continuous effort to reflect changing real-world scenario to who has likewise had to adapt in order to survive. Among most commonly remarked features of Berman's theatre are her perfectionism and, more specifically, her penchant for revision. (1) As Mexican theatre critic Olga Harmony notes, Ese rigor, que pocos de nuestros dramaturgos poseen, la lleva escribir una y otra vez sus textos, cambiando no solamente el nombre de sus obras ... Sino la esencia misma de ellas, segun va madurando y segun corren los tiempos y las costumbres (Sutilezas 112). This habit dates back to 1979 and her first full-length play, Machinegun, title that she promptly changed to Yankee after realizing that former sounded too much like mas chingon. Another play, Herejia (1983), is also known as Anatema, Los Carbajales, Los marranos, and En el nombre de Dios. (2) Berman's seemingly obsessive need to revise her plays extends, however, well beyond changes in title to detailed reworking of prior text, which Linda Hutcheon identifies as or repetition with variation (4). (3) The act of is nothing new. In his seminal study on literary influence, Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom posits that all writing is influenced by previous writing. He describes this influence, however, in positive terms such as creative revisionism and recollecting forwards, of breaking forth into freshening (83). Likewise, Edward Said, in his treatise on originality, states that the writer thinks less of writing originally, and more of rewriting (135). Indeed, one of hallmarks of postmodern expression is [t]he conscious and calculated recycling of material, from one's own previous life and work as well as those of others, ... Not only in literary texts but in theatrical performance (14). Indeed, adaptation is as inherently political as act of writing itself. As Julie Sanders states, a political or ethical commitment shapes writer's, director's, or performer's decision to re-interpret source text (2). In case of Sabina Berman, this politico-ethical commitment is to change required if Mexico is to survive current levels of violence, corruption, and moral decay. The reading or viewing of adaptation is significantly different from that of isolated play. To fully appreciate theatrical adaptation, one must consider dialogic relations that exist among various re-writings as well as temporal, political, and cultural context in which they have been written and performed. As Hutcheon explains, knowing audience, familiar with source play, experiences an interpretive doubling, conceptual flipping back and forth between work we know and work we are experiencing (139). There is, additionally, element of pleasure in experience of difference: On experiential level, conservative comfort of familiarity is countered by unpredictable pleasure in difference--for both creator and audience (Hutcheon 173). …

(O)błędne odczytania: Jacek Gutorow, Wallace Stevensi zalękniona perspektywa komparatystyki

In the present article I analyse Jacek Gutorow’s poem Nad brzegiem rzeki (At the River Bank) in relation to Wallace Stevens’s poetry. The methodological backbone for the essay is Harold Bloom’s theory of anxiety of influence. The struggle between an ephebe and a strong precursor are used in regard to the agon between the poet-translator and the poetry under translation. Translating Stevens’s works into Polish Gutorow creates a strong precursory presence in his native tongue with whom he as poet must now fight. It is in such a strife that Gutorow’s strongest vision is born, which links Stevens’s sublimity with rootedness in the familiar landscapes characteristic for Gutorow’s work.

Revealing V. Voiculescu’s Paradoxical Personality

Abstract Our short study tries to cast light upon a canonical Romanian poet’s paradoxical personality, a poet who, in our opinion, “suffered” by the “anxiety of influence” - a concept theorized by Harold Bloom - and, thus, endeavored in an imaginary translation of Shakespeare’s “last sonnets”. In order to reach our goal, we travelled throughout V. Voiculescu’s paratopia, using Maingueneau’s concept to understand how a believer was able to be - at the same time - poet, mystic, physician, philosopher and theologian, in the sense in which God the Word was speaking inside him, o theos logos. The multiple aspects of his personality are being revealed with the help of a various bibliography, into the light of Agapè, the divine love descending onto a poet who was being moved towards it by the all powerful Eros. The paradox is the fact that the full measure of his art was given at an old age - mid seventies -, an age when other poets are repeating themselves in a minor gamut, depleted by their intellectual force, as they are physically weakened.

Review: James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist by Amanda Reeser Lawrence

Amanda Reeser Lawrence James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 248 pp., 129 b/w illus. $45 (cloth), ISBN 9780300170054 Amanda Reeser Lawrence’s book about the architecture of James Stirling deftly explicates the work of a master who belongs in the canon but whose place within it has not yet been found. Stirling (1926–92) was associated with the New Brutalism of the 1950s, but his turn to postmodernism in the 1970s made him difficult to categorize. In James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist , Lawrence frames her study of selected works with the question, was Stirling a modernist or a postmodernist? She argues for him being a “revisionary modernist,” maintaining that Stirling continuously revised or corrected previous modernists’ works and, eventually, even his own in what can be understood as an act comparable to rewriting. For her interpretation, Lawrence turns to The Anxiety of Influence (1973) by Harold Bloom, whose landmark literary theory complicated the concept of influence by showing that it was a transformative process in which young, weak, ephebic poets overcame the presence of strong masters of the past by rewriting and, in fact, improving or correcting their works (Wordsworth rewrites Milton). Eventually, having become strong poets themselves, they begin to rewrite their own earlier works. Close reading was the basis of Bloom’s method: the text itself, separate from historical or biographical circumstances, becomes all that matters. Such hermeneuticism was countered by the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt, for example, who turned to history to help explain Shakespeare’s plays as cultural formations. Lawrence makes a good case for reading selected projects by Stirling using Bloom’s concepts and method. Her purpose is not to be comprehensive or biographical in interpreting Stirling because monographs and a biography already exist. A major exhibition in 2010 revealed new dimensions of Stirling’s work, but analysis is still lacking. Though nearly every significant critic and historian of the late twentieth century commented upon Stirling’s architecture, there …

Tom of Bedlam.

Tom of Bedlam.

Editor's Introduction: The Return of Theopoetics

Editor's Introduction: The Return of Theopoetics Scott Holland Over the years CrossCurrents has published many essays and articles composed in the evolving genre of theopoetics. We gave our entire March 2010 issue to Theopoetics. In recent years a number of books have been published and new courses at divinity schools have been offered exploring the movement from traditional theologies to constructive proposals in theopoetics. Readers of this journal continue to request theological and spiritual writing in this genre, and we are therefore delighted to devote this special issue to “The Return of Theopoetics.” We begin the issue featuring a young writer at the beginning of a great career. Anita Hooley Yoder's “I've Read Too Much Poetry for That” won first prize in the International Jennie Calhoun Baker 2014 Peace Essay Contest. Rather than turn to political theology or peace studies, the writer offers a satisfying poetics of peace. As one of the judges of the J.C. Baker essay contest, I'm happy to bring Hooley Yoder's writing to our readers. Two of our contributors have recently completed their own book length theopoetics. Jeff Gundy's Songs from an Empty Cage and Callid Keefe‐Perry's Way to Water: A Theopoetics Primer make wonderfully creative and constructive contributions to the field in their books and likewise in their new pieces in CrossCurrents. Although there is much new theopoetic writing today, I suggest in “The Poet: Theopoetics and Theopolitics” that Ralph Waldo Emerson might be the modern originator of the genre. The incomparable Jack Caputo, in his “Theopoetics as Heretical Hegelianism,” gives us an engaging philosophy, theology, and poetics once and at the same time. Poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf's “Water: Mother of Many Names” is travel writing that takes the reader on an existential adventure through a poetics of place. Ashley Theuring explores the spiritual art of holding hope and doubt through “The Interreligious Theopoetic Response to Public Tragedies.” Finally, Katelynn Carver's essay reminds us of the beautiful and brilliant work of the Brazilian theopoet Rubem Alves. As I was writing this introduction the news reached us that Rubem Alves died at his home in Brazil at the age of eighty. Literary critic Harold Bloom has made much of “the anxiety of influence” in the writing life. It is certainly a human and literary reality. Yet those of us who have been inspired by the theopoetics of Alves have been surprised and blessed by the ecstasy of influence. The Brazilian poet, philosopher, theologian, and psychologist insisted that the symphony, the story, and the poem return to us again and again with an invitation to enter their beauty and a mystical promise of resurrection. The old singer inspires new songs. The strong poet invites another to write her own verse. The artful storyteller helps us compose other narratives in our own voice. Indeed, the theopoets in this collection of articles and essays encourage our readers to likewise write and dwell poetically on the earth. © 2015 Association for Religion and Intellectual Life

“One Long, Unbroken, Constant Sound”: Wireless Thinking and Lyric Tinkering in Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium

“One Long, Unbroken, Constant Sound”:Wireless Thinking and Lyric Tinkering in Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium1 Edward Allen (bio) It has become a familiar refrain in periodical studies to speak of “multiple modernisms.”2 To do so is to consider the act of putting poems into circulation a collective effort, the work of many hands; but it might also be to admit a truth, no less striking, that modernist print culture was always a contested domain, sensitive to the flicker and buzz of rival media. In its first years of publication, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse proved an accommodating place for inventive thinking, an environment peculiarly suited to songs about magic lanterns and poems on the telephone.3 The effect was a productive kind of antagonism, an impression that the specialness of lyric must consist, not in its resistance to other forms of representation—the movies or a telephone call—but in its very capacity to articulate the existence of those new types of mediation. Rather than pointing up the category distinctions that might be thought to guarantee lyric’s “apartness” from other discursive modes, the technologies that turn up between the sheets of Poetry seem instead to complicate and dissolve them.4 Given the right material conditions, the modernist lyric enables something we have come to value in the new wireless age: good, unbroken reception. The subject of this article, Wallace Stevens, may seem a curiosity in this respect. He, too, was an early and enthusiastic contributor to Poetry, yet his correspondence with Monroe bespeaks a firm notion of what imaginative writing could and could not do. Stevens was admitted to the New York Bar in 1904, and his letters shuttle accordingly between intellectual occupations, conscious that poetry must remain “a form of retreat.”5 Few of [End Page 919] his early poems speak of his working environment—of New York, Hartford, or of trips to the Midwest—and their quality of attention has rarely seemed explicable in relation to the objects or processes of popular communication. Stevens worried about his attention wandering, however, and he wrote to Monroe on the subject in January 1925: Holly grows prettier and jollier every day. We have never had the least trouble with her—have never lost a wink of sleep. She babbles and plays with her hands and smiles like an angel. Such experiences are a terrible blow to poor literature. But then there’s the radio to blame, too. Really and truly, I haven’t written a thing for months. (L, 244) In 1916, Stevens had moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to commence work at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and to make a home with his wife Elsie. More carefree than careless, this letter registers the airy distractions of new domestic bliss—the burbling of “an angel,” and the ethereal hosts of a radio network. Monroe had seen something like this pass across her desk before: the interest of Robert Frost’s wartime poem “Snow” depends, as this message does, on an interplay of presence and absence, the intrusion of a machine, and the sound of a baby. In Stevens’s experience, the babblings of radio and infant mingle in a pool of sound that is wholly unremarkable, but what requires finer scrutiny is the quiet sense of alarm that accompanies the poet’s news. In acknowledging the influx of fresh sound, Stevens confirms that his new arrivals are in good working order, yet in doing so he begins to mourn the state of “poor literature.” For the clandestine poet who spends his evenings crafting verse, a radio set portends a special kind of interference. Stevens’s note to Monroe dates from the beginning of a new phase in the lawyer’s life, a period of little poetic activity that was bookended by the first and second printings of Harmonium in 1923 and 1931. Much else besides the rise of commercial radio and the patter of family life filled this interval, as biographers have shown.6 Recent critical studies have been right in this respect to move beyond Harold Bloom’s depiction of Harmonium as an “impasse” that would only be resolved in Ideas of Order...

On Violence, Joy, and Justice: The Poetry of C.k. Williams

On Violence, Joy, and Justice: The Poetry of C.k. Williams

Too Far or Not Far Enough?: Alain Badiou and the Hermeneutics of Small Moments

Too Far or Not Far Enough?Alain Badiou and the Hermeneutics of Small Moments Colin Davis introduction: critical excess According to Paul Ricoeur, post-Heideggerian hermeneutics assumes what he calls “the necessity for all understanding to be mediated by an interpretation which exhibits its insurmountable plurivocity” (56).1 There are two key elements here: first, there is no understanding without interpretation, no direct, intuitive access to the “thing itself”; and second, meanings are multiple, unstable, subject to dispute and change. Interpretation has always already begun, and so long as humans continue to inhabit the earth, it will never come to an end. The interpretation of works of art is just a specialized version of something we do all the time in our ordinary lives and interactions. Those of us who are sympathetic to hermeneutics are likely to take such views to be axiomatic to the point of accepting them without question. Even so, whilst describing a general aspect of what it means to be human, this account of the hermeneutic problem offers no solution to specific issues of interpretation. Hermeneutics, I suggest, concedes the instability of meaning but also seeks to rein it in. If there is no final, uniquely correct reading, how do I decide when to stop interpreting? How do I know when I can go further or when I have gone too far? When does interpretation become excessive? The main body of this article takes the case of the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s writing on film to consider the risks and gains of interpretation when it takes place outside the methodological constraints which govern institutionalized practices. The larger problem here is how and whether we should regulate our interpretive endeavours. In the heady days of the theory wars, poststructuralists found themselves accused of endorsing an irresponsible, freewheeling attitude according to which they could say anything they wanted. Although this grossly misrepresented poststructuralism, it was easier to insist that it was not true than it was actually to formulate what the constraints on interpretation might be. If interpretation does not aim to be finally, definitively right, or at least persuasive enough for the time being, then what is its point? By what criteria can we assess its truth or usefulness? [End Page 83] Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and some of his later work cut through this problem by replacing the vocabulary of “right” and “wrong” with “strong” and “weak.” “There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations,” Bloom tells us (95). Abandoning the goal of interpretive correctness does not, however, mean that every misinterpretation is as good or bad as any other. All readings are misreadings, but some are preferable to others; and the strong/weak dichotomy provides the criteria by which this can be justified. The great poets are strong mis-readers of their precursors; and the good critics are in their turn strong misreaders as well. It is important here that the misreading practised by poets is deemed to be replicated, albeit less creatively, by critics. If all interpretation is misinterpretation, then “all criticism is prose poetry” (95). We critics may be flattered to find ourselves characterized as prose poets; and at the same time we may be disconcerted to discover that our efforts at interpretation have no grounding in truth. In his distinction between strong and weak (mis)readings Bloom makes explicit something which had long underpinned the interpretation of art, particularly as practised by philosophers. I take Martin Heidegger to be a key figure in this context. In his essays on poetry, Heidegger suggested that the ancient rivalry between philosophy and literature could be overcome. For Heidegger, thought and poetry at their finest are the twin peaks of human achievement, different in form yet both engaged in the same quest for understanding. The philosopher might learn more from attending patiently to the words of the poets than from the works of fellow philosophers. In terms of philosophical approach, this entails the key shift from aesthetics to hermeneutics. Aesthetics, as Heidegger explains in the Epilogue to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” takes the work of art as an object and seeks to give information about its nature (77). In...

Postcolonial World Literature: Forster-Roy-Morrison

In the last fifty years or so, we have seen the emergence of discursive formations, among them, certain new literatures, some even finding homes in programs like African American Studies, Women's Studies, and others. During the same time, we have also seen the emergence of theory, literary theory, as continuous but also discontinuous to literary criticism. Among these discursive formations is postcolonial and postcolonial theory, which are, however, fortunately or unfortunately, unhoused in any particular department or program. It is at least partially in response to this last that there has, more recently, been a (mainly) Western articulation of literature which can be seen as the cultural, and more specifically, literary or artistic organ of Western (economic and political) globalization. The emergence of world literature, spurred by the publication of Pascale Casanova's World Republic of Letters, has produced an interesting discussion, sympathetic or otherwise. These discussions have offered alternative methods for reading literature, or perhaps developed and foregrounded methods that were previously not as prominent, alternative, for example, to close reading or close textual analysis, a method well established in literary study and perhaps to some extent even fetishized. These methods for the study of world include a careful consideration of publication sites, distribution networks, circulation rates. They pay attention to the intricacies of translation, already problematized in postcolonial studies. And quite predictably, they direct our attention to the matter of influence, often in the vocabulary of derivation and appropriation, in a context of invariably asymmetrical power relations. As useful and interesting as the category of world has been, as a sort of cultural superstructure to the base of globalization, some critics, like Mohanty for example who speaks of the globalization of feminist studies, find the exploration and discussion of globalization to be peculiarly ungendered and deracialized-peculiar particularly given the fairly recent history of colonialism and slavery. (1) What I find attractive in these articulations of a world literature, however, is the possibility of a metrics for literary study, with its computations of sites, networks, rates, and so on in a system of cultures. In the interest of such a computational syntax, I will offer an algorithm of sorts, marking the spatio-temporal coordinates for a reading of world but without removing it from the historical realities of race, gender, and other markers of differential power relations. My reading is also a close reading, a close textual analysis that reinstates the literariness of as one of its important qualities. I focus on Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and some of Toni Morrison's novels, particularly The Bluest Eye and Beloved. To demonstrate that there is a conceptual cohesion in the framework I am using, that of the vertical-lateral/ historical-geographical coordinates embedded in literary texts produced by these Indian writers, I will be citing other Indian writers like Hari Kunzru, Aravind Adiga, and Salman Rushdie, all recent recipients of prestigious literary recognition. These writers also cite other English, American, and Indian writers. Such citational practices, after all, constitute a tradition, in this case, an emergent tradition of world literature, even if these practices are not necessarily motivated by authorial intention or by what Harold Bloom articulates as an anxiety of influence or a map of misreading. The postcolonial text executes a double articulation or a dual spatio-temporality, a vertical and temporal articulation on one hand and a horizontal and spatial articulation on the other. The former maps the text's relation with the past, the Indian, the British, and African American past, although here the primary coordinates are the history of British colonialism in India and specially the literary representations of it, as in Forster and Orwell. …

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

On Pascal’s Revealed Word (and What it Says about Being Human)

On Pascal’s Revealed Word (and What it Says about Being Human) Andrew Pigott (bio) Le cœur a ses raisons … Perhaps we should begin, in naïve earnestness, by consulting the heart. Perhaps, before erecting our scholarly apparatus, advancing our arguments and adducing the evidence we have compiled, we should attend, not to the “text itself” (whatever that means), but to the feelings that the text provokes. And perhaps, in so doing, we will be led to a question of overwhelming simplicity: what is it with Pascal anyway? The question can be understood in various ways. It can, for instance, express a particular sort of admiration—that of the dour co-religionist, who weighs the rhetorical efficacy not of Les Pensées so much as of L’Apologie that they came to supplant, and deems it a fit enough tool to bludgeon the backslider.1 Or, three parts outburst and one part frenzy, it can ride the crest of a mounting indignation, or trace the threshold of an intolerable disgust—past which Valéry noses out and decries, “dans cette attitude parfaitement triste,” a dogged and systematic will to abase;2 and Saint-Beuve reproaches him his tin ear;3 and Charles [End Page 902] Peguy intuits that no mind so extremist in bent can fully embrace, much less exemplify, the spirit of Christian caritas—and so fruitlessly Les Pensées reason, and toothlessly their reasons bite: “Il faut produire. Il ne faut ni démontrer ni expliquer. Pascal raisonne trop, alors les incroyants lui poussent des colles et se foutent de lui” (ctd. in Douglas 828). Finally, it can incorporate bits of both and all of neither, threading the vanishingly small passage between Jansenist propaganda and humanist blowback: an uncomfortable space to occupy, for around it the factions of the soul war ceaselessly, and in it contraries meet. Here we will disagree with Pascal and yet find ourselves moved by him; will (per Péguy’s prediction) fail utterly to convert, but will not (despite his grim imaginings) mock or shrug indifferently, because while we reject the content of Pascal’s “coquilles,”4 we do not (cannot) deny their pertinence … though as to what and to whom we remain in the dark. We will feel, in short, both that none of this at all concerns us—not our habits, not our values, not our world, bedeviled by its own intractable crises—and that something deep within ourselves—our humanness, our pith—has been profoundly implicated: staked on a wager between parties that we cannot as yet identify, the import of which we only dimly perceive. To the latter group belong, each in his own way, Stendhal, Baudelaire and Nietzsche; for each felt within himself a sympathetic vibration not to any particular argument, but rather to the soulfulness, the profundity, and the tremendous disquiet that Pascal’s arguments give voice to and conceal. When Harold Bloom observes, “Montaigne remains in our mind, Pascal in our heart” (5) I take him to ratify their experience. Theirs and ours too, or at least a majority of us, as how could it be otherwise? In a world where religiosity has waned in inverse proportion to Pascal’s fan-base, piety alone cannot account for our sustained interest, nor can all that Barcosian misanthropy have done much to suppress it. “Si le cuivre s’éveille clarion,” writes Rimbaud, “il n’y a rien de sa faute”; similarly, something there is in Pascal that does not love self-loathing—that despite (indeed because of) his best efforts to kill it dead, whelms glorious and annealed up from every putdown. This, it seems to me, is what “we” react to; and to that reaction the present article will attempt to do justice. But first, an example. Fragment 758 deals, ostensibly, with “l’amour propre,” with friendship, and with the grammar of social relations.5 Vertiginous leaps [End Page 903] abound, as do stark generalizations; still, it proves easy enough to reconstitute the stages of the argument. (1) Touching the self, our aspirations and perceptions drastically misalign. (Whence that cascade of antitheses, which in its searing simplicity and accumulated power attains to a Biblical eloquence: “[le...