Literary Lineage Research Articles

Being Beat: The Stern Reality of London's Tramp Diary and Kerouac's Road

Being BeatThe Stern Reality of London's Tramp Diary and Kerouac's Road Paul Crumbley (bio) In the "Author's Introduction" that appears in the opening pages of his 1960 collection of travel sketches, Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac presents a brief résumé of his life in which he includes the following item: "read the life of Jack London at 18 and decided also to be an adventurer, a lonesome traveler" (v). While Kerouac is without question alluding to his experience of reading about London's life during the eighteenth year of his own, it is possible with hindsight and perhaps a touch of literary-historical prestidigitation to extract a layer of unintended meaning from Kerouac's words and make the case that he was in fact reading about London's life at the time that London was eighteen. This proposition may at first seem far-fetched but becomes somewhat less so when considering the fact that the eighteen-year-old London kept a record of his 1894 participation in the nation-wide labor action known as Coxey's Industrial Army in a document now referred to as the Tramp Diary,1 the same document that would provide the germ for London's 1907 book The Road. It is this 1907 book that John Seelye identified in 1963 as having established "the tradition in which Kerouac has been writing" (340), thereby providing the basis for an indirect line of influence that connects the unpublished London Tramp Diary with Kerouac's literary career.2 Close examination of the Tramp Diary reveals that even at the age of eighteen London had begun to develop a rudimentary philosophy of life on the road that corresponds closely to the interdependence of adventure and lonesomeness that Kerouac singled out in his résumé. More significantly, London's early philosophy bears a surprisingly close resemblance to core elements of what Kerouac would famously refer to as being "Beat" and further clarifies the cultural and literary lineage that unites London with Kerouac and the consequent emergence of the Beat [End Page 32] Generation. This line of descent becomes clearest when comparing key passages in the Tramp Diary with Kerouac's comments on Beat culture and looking at the way London's revisions of the Tramp Diary for inclusion in The Road reconstruct core features of this shared philosophy without significantly diminishing its appeal to Kerouac. London's revisions illuminate in sometimes startling fashion the extent that he utilized a distinctively naturalist brand of romance3 that incorporates elements of melodrama to magnify features of life on the road in an effort to reach a broad readership. Kerouac was part of that readership and it is not in the least surprising that his most famous road novel, On the Road, contains clear evidence of London's influence. In the sixth entry London makes in his Tramp Diary, for April 11, 1894, he describes what might be considered a mis-en-scene for his own writing about the road and the Beat writers that followed him. In fragmentary, blunt language of the kind to be expected in notes complied while living the tramp life, London records his parting of the ways with Frank Davis, the friend who set out with him from Oakland to join Kelly's Army, the Oakland branch of Coxey's Industrial Army.4 London first describes "an understanding" (L10, E34)5 he reached with Frank and then goes on to acknowledge the hardships that attend such a rugged and unpredictable life. "The road," London concedes in his diary entry, "had no more charms for [Frank]." Seemingly undaunted by Frank's disenchantment, however, the eighteen-year-old London immediately identifies those very charms in broad terms that make clear how the fire that died in the heart of his friend still burns in his own: "The romance & adventure is gone & nothing remains but the stern reality of the hardships to be endured" (L10–11, E34).6 For London and the Beat writers who came after him, the "stern reality" of the road exerted an almost irresistible appeal precisely because of its power to strip romance of illusion and ground adventure in the unmediated demands of...

Virginia Woolf, Elena Ferrante, and the Angry Modern/ist Woman

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf famously writes, “Chloe liked Olivia,” a line that anticipates, and even directs, feminist literary scholarship through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.[1] Woolf’s modernist feminism, in A Room and a range of other literary essays, calls for a female literary lineage as well as histories of the anonymous women whose stories

Computer-Generated Fiction in a Literary Lineage

This article examines the place of computer-generated literary texts within the boundaries of modern literary analysis. Any act of reading engages interpretive faculties; modern readers assume a text to embody human agency. With this assumption, readers assign authorial intention and hence develop a perceived contract between the author and the reader. Yet computer-generated texts bring this contract into question. Drawing from historical examples of conceptual writing, this article shows how computer-generated fiction calls into question current conceptions of authorship and what it means to be a reader, but it nevertheless fits within a longstanding literary lineage.

Vernacular Missing: Miraji on Sappho, Gender, and Governance

Abstract Vernacularization as a concept has gained circulation in our time within the ambit of South Asia: scholars use it to name what they designate as local—whether sexuality, language, architecture, religion, capital, or aesthetic practices. When claims are made for “vernacularization” as a process of opening spaces for “the local,” vernacular languages, ontologies, and epistemologies are paradoxically oriented towards English/the West. What happens if the word, term, concept, process “vernacular” loses this purchase? What might we notice if we refused to rehabilitate vernacularization in this fashion and mobilized instead an accounting of the brutalist colonial histories where it was deployed for colonial transformation? The Urdu modernist poet Miraji (1912–1949), eschewing the term “vernacular,” mined English and European languages, and other Asian and Indian literary lineages, to fill Urdu’s possible legacies through translation. Miraji established possible futures for Urdu through bygone chronicles, stories, and lyrical possibilities that were not subservient to the fluctuations of value that vernacularization carried with it.

The Line of Maurice: Forster, Hollinghurst and the ‘Social Fabric’

E.M. Forster’s Maurice, which was written in 1913 and 1914, was published only after Forster’s death in 1970 – almost sixty years later. Its long absence from the public domain renders it permanently anachronistic, since it was was never able to address directly its early twentieth century context. This paper considers how Maurice, in lamenting the oppression of homosexual men, offers a trenchant criticism of aspects of the ‘social fabric’ itself, including contemporary constructions of masculinity. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, published in 1988, is imbued with Forsterian echoes. Unlike Maurice, it was able to engage more openly with its social and political context; unlike the repressed Maurice Hall, its protagonist, Will Beckwith, enjoys what seems to be a sexually liberated lifestyle. However, Hollinghurst’s social criticism is if anything more stringent than Forster’s, for he shows that, despite the apparent sexual freedom enjoyed by gay men, there has been very little progress where the inclusion of these men in the ‘social fabric’ is concerned. This makes his novel darker and bleaker than Forster’s. Reading the two works together suggests that unpredictability and reversals may lie within ostensibly straightforward literary lineages.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Michael D. Pante Distinguishing between foreign and Filipino has always been a complicated act in Philippine studies, yet one often taken for granted. The line separating natives from non-natives, historically and historiographically, has existed more like erratic fissures than a stable boundary. Such fissures do not make for neat categories; instead, they point to underlying sociohistorical fault lines. The stories of three figures who tower over this journal issue—Horacio de la Costa, Daniel Burnham, and Juan Tamad—reveal these complexities. Horacio de la Costa's career as a Jesuit leader demonstrates the immense pressure that decolonization exerted upon society to delineate between native and non-native. As Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr and Nicholas Sy show, even the Jesuits' fraternal lives could not insulate them from external forces then stirring postcolonial Philippine society. The Jesuit organization in the country attained its status as a full-fledged province of the Society of Jesus in 1957, a time when calls for Filipinization of various facets of Philippine society—from economic nationalism to nationalist education—were raging. The politics of Filipinization affected the Jesuits as to cause a rift between the American and Filipino clergy. De la Costa found himself at the center of the storm when he became the first Filipino superior of the Philippine province of the Society of Jesus (1964–1970). Initially, his notion of Filipinization revolved around the need to train more Filipino priests, thereby allowing the Catholic Church to "take root" and become a native institution. Eventually, De la Costa's preference for Filipino Jesuits clashed with the lingering but dominant presence of American Jesuits, especially those who continued to teach in Jesuit schools. Under his leadership, the number of Filipino Jesuits in leadership positions considerably increased, pushing this group to gain a relative majority over foreign missionaries by 1976. De la Costa tried to strike a balance between the two camps, but ultimately supported the pro-Filipino forces within the order while giving American Jesuits a secondary role, a decision that must be understood in the context of widespread radicalism that had permeated even the Ateneo de Manila. [End Page 265] De la Costa's struggle mirrored that of Pedro Peláez and José Burgos, two priests who championed the cause of Philippine-born, secular priests against Spanish friars in the nineteenth century. The question of the natives' capacity for religious leadership was integral in both situations, despite the hundred-year gap in between. De la Costa, an eminent historian, could not have missed this uncanny parallelism. De la Costa was also editor of this journal, and Aguilar and Sy's article is our belated contribution to the celebration of his birth centenary in 2016. Landscapes usually conjure ideas of home, of unchanging permanence. In this light, the landscapes within a nation's territory can be understood as inherent parts of that nation's ancestral domain, as it were. Daniel Burnham's place in Philippine history, however, shows otherwise. Scott Kirsch's analysis of Burnham's urban plans for American-era Manila and Baguio treats the physical environment and geographical features of the two cities as dynamic and contingent. Kirsch tackles the shift from Hispanic to American in the aesthetic regime in Philippine city landscapes, a transition signaled by Burnham's 1904–1905 visit to the country. Clearly imperial in outlook, the plans turned both cities into spaces for the reproduction of US colonialism. The aesthetics embedded in them were meant to be consumed by American administrators and businessmen, not by Filipinos. Manila and Baguio became derivatives of Washington, DC, and British Simla, respectively. Thus, rather than signify indigeneity, the landscapes of Burnham's Manila and Baguio evoke the foreign. Lastly, multiple layers of cultural appropriation make it difficult to identify whether certain ideological products are foreign or native. Laurence Marvin Castillo illustrates this point through the heteroglossia of fictional character Juan Tamad. The numskull trickster Juan traces his literary lineage to the precolonial pusong genre, but this character enters Philippine literature through the awit, a colonial form of metrical romance popular during the Spanish period. As a signifier of the natives' supposed indolence, his ideological utility for colonialism was apparent. Nonetheless, in...

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

A Promise Song: Ernest J. Gaines's Early Fictions and the Community of Black Women Writing

A Promise Song:Ernest J. Gaines's Early Fictions and the Community of Black Women Writing Lucy Biederman (bio) In January 1971, Alice Walker wrote to a senior editor at Dial Press praising Ernest J. Gaines's soon-to-be-published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In her letter, Walker concludes that "no other American writer has made such an effort to comprehend the strength and rugged tenderness of the black woman in all her courage and rare beauty" (Letter to William Decker). Later that year, Walker would review Gaines's most recent novel for the New York Times Book Review, characterizing its author as "much closer to Charles Dickens, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes than he is to Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison" (116). Locating Gaines in a literary lineage that skews toward Victorian and early modernist writers, Walker follows Gaines's own attempts to distance himself from the contemporary politics of racial strife associated with Wright's and Ellison's work. Walker, meanwhile, places herself in a lineage that includes Gaines. Writing to Gaines in 1969, she confesses, "I don't [envy you], but I don't because it is possible for me to think of you as a great teacher. I'm still young enough for that" (Letter to Gaines). Walker's 1969 letter to Gaines and her 1971 letter about Gaines border 1970, often considered a foundational year in what Hortense Spillers calls "the community of black women writing in the United States" (249). In that year, Walker, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou published their first books, and Toni Cade's multi-genre anthology The Black Woman was published. Throughout the ensuing decade, critics including Mary Helen Washington, Barbara Christian, and Barbara Smith established a criticism devoted to recovering black women writers, such as Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston, and to articulating a distinct tradition of black women's writing. Many of the significant creative works to come out of this community, including early novels by Morrison and Walker, Gayl Jones's 1975 Corregidora, the short stories of Cade (Bambara) in volumes like Gorilla My Love from 1972, and the poetry of Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and others, are lauded for their attention to, as Walker puts it in her letter to Dial Press, "the strength and [End Page 1] rugged tenderness of the black woman in all her courage and rare beauty" (Letter to William Decker). By 1970, meanwhile, Ernest Gaines had already published his first two novels, Catherine Carmier in 1964 and Of Love and Dust three years later; Bloodline, a book of short stories, appeared in 1968. Critics of Gaines have typically focused on Gaines's representations of African-American manhood (see, for example, Suzanna W. Jones and, particularly, the incisive work of Keith Clark), and what attention scholars have paid to Gaines's treatment of women generally has been focused on matriarchal elders (see, for example, Marcia Gaudet and Trudier Harris). However, Gaines, in his first four major publications and throughout his ensuing literary career, considers closely the lives of young black women, as well. And like many texts to emerge from the "community of black women writing" that coalesced in and just after 1970, Gaines's fictions in the 1960s are set in the rural South. Gaines's fictions are set in southwest Louisiana, a landscape replete with "dark, fertile soil, the immense pecan and live-oak trees hung with Spanish moss," and air so thick and hot that it "shapes the moods and even the decisions of many of Gaines's characters" (Doyle 5). In important and enduring ways, Gaines and his work stand apart from the community of women writing; however, Gaines's early works also prefigure some of the methods and themes by which black feminist writers like Morrison, Walker, and Angelou came to be known. In this essay, I argue that a more expansive understanding of the subtle and often contradictorily feminist undertones in Gaines's fictions can be gleaned by drawing lines of influence, contiguity, and correspondence between his early works and the works of explicitly feminist black women writers of the 1970s...

Editors' Introduction

Research Article| March 01 2015 Editors' Introduction Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) (2015) 34 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerjewilite.34.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Editors' Introduction. Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) 1 March 2015; 34 (1): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerjewilite.34.1.0001 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 CollectivePenn State University PressStudies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) Search Advanced Search When we first put out our call for papers in January 2012, we conceived of a special issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature that would deal with a range of topics defining and investigating the various possible configurations and meanings of Jewish American poetry. We asked for essays on Jewish poetry written in America, on American poetry written by Jews on matters Jewish, or on American poetry written in Jewish languages, including Yiddish, Hebrew, and Ladino. The essays we envisioned could focus on a broad range of questions, including those of literary lineage, intertextuality, gender, genre, exegesis, translation, ethnicity, or identity. The eight final selections in response to our call cover just such a range of topics as well as intersections and crossovers between languages and cultures. We present in this issue four essays on Yiddish poetry, three on poetry in English, and one on an American Hebrew poet.... You do not currently have access to this content.

Joseph Brodsky’s Constellation of Poets

Joseph Brodsky’s Constellation of Poets Jeffrey Meyers (bio) Man is what he reads, and poets even more so. —Joseph Brodsky Many of the best Soviet writers were crushed and annihilated under Stalin. Osip Mandelstam died in a prison camp; Isaac Babel was executed; Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva committed suicide; Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn went into exile in the United States but later returned to Europe. Joseph Brodsky, in contrast, fled to the United States, married, had a child, and remained in America. He took pains to become culturally acclimatized, and he learned to write poetry and criticism in English. Apart from Samuel Beckett’s writing in French, all major authors who changed languages—Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Arthur Koestler—moved, like Brodsky, from their native tongues into English. Why was Brodsky, the perennial outsider in his own land, so enthusiastically taken in here? He became a close friend of Mikhail Baryshnikov, was translated by eminent poets such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, and gave sixty poetry readings during the first eighteen months in his new country. He was published in the New York Review of Books, was elected poet laureate of the U.S., and won distinguished professorships, a Guggenheim fellowship, the French Légion d’Honneur, membership in the American Academy, the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, honorary doctorates from Oxford and Yale, a MacArthur award, and the Nobel Prize—which W. H. Auden, whom Brodsky rightly considered infinitely superior to himself, did not receive. In short, after his change of empires, he [End Page 123] reaped every reward and honor the American artistic and intellectual world could bestow upon a poet. Except for physical beauty and a successful suicide (though he did once cut his wrists), Brodsky had every extra-literary quality that could enhance a reputation. He dropped out of school at fifteen, which allowed his originality to flourish, and gained unusual experience as a geologist in Siberia. His poems were condemned, suppressed, and confined to the underground in Russia. He showed courage and a stoical lack of complaint as a Jewish victim of Soviet persecution, became a legend when the transcript of his trial was published in the West, spent time in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, and was sent into harsh exile in the Arctic Circle. He derived tragic authority from several heart attacks, heart operations, and the threat of an early death, and had the same blessing and encouragement of Auden (who wrote the foreword to his Selected Poems) as he had had from Anna Akhmatova. He lived modestly and was generous to Russian exiles, was an impressive personality and inspiring teacher, and was charismatic in conversation and in the strongly accented, bardic chanting of his poems. He quickly learned English and wrote impressively in his new language. Though his involuntary exile was a fortunate escape and his life in America infinitely better than in Russia, he had lost his country, his language, his parents, his lovers, and two children. But, as his translator Daniel Weissbort observes, “he made light of exile, stressing the gains both material and spiritual or intellectual, minimizing the losses.” His poems were first written in Russian, then translated by him and others into English, and finally written in English. But most of his criticism, Less Than One (1986) and On Grief and Reason (1995), was originally written in English; and he spoke with authority when describing how poets create. Brodsky’s superb essays on ten modern poets not only illuminate their subjects, but also define his own literary lineage and reveal how he became an American poet. Two of them were women and three—Akhmatova, Auden, and Spender—were close friends. The other poets he admired were Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, Constantine Cavafy and Eugenio Montale, Hardy and Frost. While maintaining his love for Russian poetry, he also took possession of Anglophone poets—especially Hardy, Frost, and Auden—and learned from them how to become a poet and critic in English. Brodsky’s sympathetic account of his constellation of modern poets and mentors is an intellectual autobiography that complements his own poetry and provides insight into how his mind...

Rewriting medieval Japanese women: politics, personality, and literary production in the life of Nun Abutsu

Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women explores the world of thirteenth-century Japan through the life of a prolific noblewoman known as Nun Abutsu (1225-1283). Abutsu crossed gender and genre barriers by writing the first career guide for Japanese noblewomen, the first female-authored poetry treatise, and the first poetic travelogue by a woman--all despite the increasingly limited social mobility for women during the Kamakura era (1185-1336). Capitalising on her literary talent and political prowess, Abutsu rose from middling origins and single-motherhood to a prestigious marriage and membership in an esteemed literary lineage. Abutsu's life is well documented in her own letters, diaries, and commentaries, as well as in critiques written by rivals, records of poetry events, and legal documents. Drawing on these and other literary and historiographical sources, including The Tale of Genji , author Christina Laffin demonstrates how medieval women responded to institutional changes that transformed their lives as court attendants, wives, and nuns. Despite increased professionalisation of the arts, competition over sources of patronage, and rivalling claims to literary expertise, Abutsu proved her poetic capabilities through her work and often used patriarchal ideals of femininity to lay claim to political and literary authority. Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women effectively challenges notions that literary salons in Japan were a phenomenon limited to the Heian period (794-1185) and that literary writing and scholarship were the domain of men during the Kamakura era. Its analysis of literary works within the context of women's history makes clear the important role that medieval women and their cultural contributions continued to play in Japanese history.

The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry ed. by Koen Vermeir, Michael Funk Deckard (review)

Reviewed by: The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry ed. by Koen Vermeir, Michael Funk Deckard Iain Hampsher-Monk Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard, editors. The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. International Archives of the History of Ideas, 206. Dordrecht-New York: Springer, 2012. Pp. xxii + 337. Cloth $139.00. Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was born of his youthful ambitions for literary fame, ambitions he had to compromise by entering politics to support himself and his young family. It is the one work of systematic philosophy from an author whose greater fame derived from his attack on the philosophical politics of the French revolution and its English sympathizers. As such it has held an important place—not only in the history of aesthetics through its influence on Kant—but increasingly for historians of political ideas looking to systematize his otherwise topical political writings. For Burke, neither aesthetics nor “political philosophy” had the distinct genre-identities they now possess: the work was rather a contribution to the recently emerged field of “Criticism and Belles Lettres,” with valences to a range of subject areas we would often now recognize as distinct—physiology, psychology, literary criticism, rhetoric, politics, even, whisper it, cultural studies. This volume of fifteen essays claims to be the first entirely devoted to the work, and the editors, while drawing attention to the diversity of genres and interpretations with which it has been identified, argue for “a science of sensitivity” as the node of a range of mid-century preoccupations and disciplines—philosophical, medical, and literary—that occasioned a burst of essays on what we now call aesthetics. In Part I, Science and Sensibility, Steffan Ducheyne discusses the Enquiry’s deployment of Newtonian methodology; Joseph Pippin III identifies a knowable objective metaphysics in the Enquiry, which, he claims, confirms the neo-Aristotelian against the Lockean reading of Burke; Aris Sarafinos’s fine essay shows the wider physiological and even meteorological context of the material grounding Burke gives his concept of sensibility; and Herman Parret pursues Burke’s reputation forward into the German-speaking world, more particularly Herder’s critique of Burke for failing to systematize the somatic basis of sensibility, to which they both subscribed. In Part II, Sensibility, Morals and Manners, the German reception is further pursued by Bart Vandenabeele’s discussion of Kant’s response to, and differences with, Burke, agreeing with him on the social character of aesthetic experience, but rejecting Burke’s view that any universal claims can be found in, or drawn from, its purely empirical sources. F. P. Locke’s “Politics of Burke’s Enquiry” argues it is a mistake to assume there are any—urging readers take seriously the terms ‘philosophical’ and ‘enquiry’ in the title. It is, in origin and conception, a work of “genuine intellectual curiosity.” Dan O’Neill, by contrast, argues that, even setting aside its possible relationship to later works, the Enquiry is “on its own an important work of political theory,” while Paddy Bullard assures us a scholarly consensus exists denying important connections between Reflections and the Enquiry, before turning his attention to the Miltonic references in the Enquiry. A preoccupation with the literary features of the work (Bullard, Ryan, De Bruyn, Saint Perinetti, Girons) is not confined to the last section, Aesthetics and the Science of Sensibility. Burke’s claim about the greater power of the Sublime is clearly borne out by its dominance as a theme here, and central to many is the tracing of the filiations of the Sublime from its origins in Longinus—or even earlier (Cressida Ryan), or forward to contemporary aesthetics (Girons: “the revenge of obscurity”). But the classical is not the only literary lineage discussed: K. O’Donnell reads the work as grounded in an oral, Erse culture—a Gaelic sublime; while others draw attention to the Bible and indeed the relation between the Biblical and classical sublime (Paddy Bullard). Among the best contributions bringing together the literary and the historical are Dario Perinetti’s philosophically subtle and well-contextualized discussion of the relationship between Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” and...

Caroline Gordon’s Ghosts: The Women on the Porch as Southern Gothic Literature

Soon after its publication in 1944, Caroline Gordon's The Women on Porch--her sixth novel--generated two reviews in The New York Times. The first, by Orville Prescott, noted that novel's dust jacket depicted the figure of young woman fleeing from nameless terrors of dark forest, and that encircling gloom that menaces her ... billows and eddies pages of [the] cryptic and peculiar (17). Prescott also conveyed that Gordon's latest work wandered through series of spirals and convolutions of time and place and thought, slipping from stream of consciousness of one character to that of another, from Tennessee to New York, from present to past (17). The result was an elusive [and] haunting, taut and twisted, work that like novels of a number of her fellow Southern[ers] shared a preoccupation with death and decay and destruction ... [While] she does not engage in ghoulish melodramatics of Faulkner ... her sense of doom and frustration is [just] as great (Prescott 17). The second review, written by Lorine Pruette, similarly underscored novel's modernist and gothic elements, specifically its thick shadows of past, its depiction of struggle between Old and New South, and its intricate narrative form--a modified stream-of-consciousness technique ... [which] admirably evokes mood (BR6). Much of other criticism that followed initial publication of The Women of Porch focused on mythological framework of novel, which is based on saga of Orpheus's and Eurydice's descent into, and escape from, Hades; heroic quests of protagonists; and its innovation in structure. Agrarians Andrew Lytle and Brainard Cheney were among first to recognize literary merits of Gordon's novel. Cheney was particularly laudatory, describing it as profoundly informed by tradition and history. The Women on Porch, he predicted, would be novel that would last because it not only gives us realism of [its] time but [also] characters, places, and situations which tend toward [the] symbolic representation of our experience (Cheney 149-150). Despite this initial excitement, over years The Women on Porch has been marginalized in favor of earlier Gordon works such as Penhally (1931), Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), and None Shall Look Back (1937), which have come to dominate Gordon criticism. The Women on Porch has been categorized either, at worst, as succession of frozen moments, each with its own prearranged meaning ... [with] no progression, no plot ... [just] elegiac pattern of decline and fall (Gray 157) or, at best, as transitionary in that it signals Gordon's movement away from grand historical novels about Old South (Brown 367), and toward critiquing Agrarian agenda espoused in earlier works. What has been lost in these analyses, however, is Prescott's and Pruette's original emphasis on novel's gothic elements, which not only position it among many of greatest contributions to Southern Renaissance but also serve as framework to examine some of Gordon's concerns with Agrarian manifesto. In particular, gothic elements in The Women on Porch address unresolved antagonism between Old and New South, feasibility of their agenda in an increasing urban and industrial mid-twentieth-century South, and role of women within this shifting social dynamic. This essay seeks to recuperate and expand upon these initial interpretations of The Women on Porch by considering novel as an example of Southern Renaissance literature which uses gothic elements to question Agrarian cause--quite daring project for Gordon given that she was married to one of movement's founders and an unofficial member herself (Tunc, Recuperating 182-183). Only by placing novel in dialogue with other prominent works of Renaissance can its literary lineage be restored and its deep criticism of southern society be revealed. …

Travels with Mark Powell

Travels with Mark Powell Pete Duval (bio) Mark Powell and I met as fellows at Bread Loaf in August of 2004. We hit it off immediately, bought some electric sheers, shaved our heads, gathered up the shorn hair, put it all in a Ziploc bag. We've been boys ever since. This requires, perhaps, some explanation. I was browsing in the impromptu book store the conference sets up every year in the cellar of one of its yellow buildings, still overwhelmed and wondering how I'd ended up at Bread Loaf, where so many of my literary heroes had passed through. Over in the corner, this tall blond guy was doing the same thing—browsing, seemingly a bit nervous and maybe a little out of place himself. He went out. I followed. Halfway across Route 125, I caught up with him. I forget what I said by way of introduction, but minutes later we were careening into town in my old Benz, lost in manic conversation. I kept thinking, this guy is so trusting and open, so obviously full of life. At dinner two nights later we decided—I'm not sure how or why, exactly—to shave our heads. The next thing I knew, we were standing in the parking lot of the CVS where we'd purchased electric sheers, the passenger door of the Benz open, a Vermont evening falling as we got to work in the light from the cab's ceiling lamp. Just after I'd sheered a landing strip down the middle of Mark's head, what little charge the battery held gave out. The look on his face in the moment before I remembered the DC adapter in the glove compartment would have been hilarious if it weren't also a little frightening. He's a big guy. I found the adapter, and we finished our artless barbering, and drove back up the mountain with the windows open, the cool air on our scalps. One could, I'll admit, be forgiven for considering this an odd decision, shaving one's head in the middle of a literary conference. But it seemed so natural a thing to do, the kind of spontaneous eruption of the ecstatic foolishness and illumination we would share again and again in the years to come, and which I've never regretted, despite our having to reintroduce ourselves to the confused folks at the conference, who no longer recognized us. Mark Powell has a ravenous and eclectic curiosity. He can talk at length and with as much authority about Dietrich Bonhoeffer's notion [End Page 49] of cheap grace as about the nuances of the .-. defense. He knows the words to "Ice, Ice, Baby"—will perform the song, in fact, if asked, with all sincerity and the moves of Vanilla himself—yet listens while he writes to Bach's Concerto Number . in F Minor. Without doubt, he's the hardest working writer I know. He approaches the discipline with the tenacity and deadly seriousness of a moral imperative. The man is old school, in the best senses of that phrase. The furthest thing from doctrinaire, his writing is nevertheless profoundly religious, in large part because it's so clearly sourced to the wellspring of all spiritual understanding—this physical world. Small things matter to him. Or, put another way, there are no small things. To Powell, the concrete contingencies of moment and place are of sacramental significance, the texture of rust on an old Cub Cadet lawn mower as essential to the experience of his fictions as the nuances of character and plot. He's a modest man; he'd be embarrassed by such comparisons, but I see him as heir to the literary lineage of Melville, Conrad, Flannery O'Connor, Denis Johnson, Robert Stone. Reading him, you know immediately you're in the hands of a writer after the big game. His work embraces, like all serious literature, something we perhaps need reminding of more than ever—that we live out our lives, moment to moment, in bodies. In 2007, walking to the train after hearing Don DeLillo read at the 92nd St. Y, we talked about what we hoped...

Rita Dove’s Poetic Expeditions

Research Article| March 01 2012 Rita Dove’s Poetic Expeditions Reena Sastri Reena Sastri Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2012) 58 (1): 90–116. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-2005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Reena Sastri; Rita Dove’s Poetic Expeditions. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2012; 58 (1): 90–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-2005 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Poetess Tradition

It is taken for granted today that Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry detailed the sexual and social liberation of the modern woman. But why, critics ask, does she represent the emergence of modernity in such distinctly un-modern poetic forms? While the work of her female contemporaries, such H. D. and Marianne Moore, distances itself from the nineteenth-century conventions of the genre, the majority of Millay's poetry evoked them; her work was conservative in the sense that she conserved past traditions. A number of critics, among them Robert Johnson and Jane Stanbrough, have attempted to make sense of the apparently problematic opposition between her subversive ethos and her traditional forms. They have thus concluded that Millay exercises a healthy poetic restraint, containing modern emotional unruliness and vulnerability within self-imposed and protective formal limitations. (1) Millay's poetic self-discipline assuaged and explained the conflict between innovative content and conventional form. I want to suggest that such an approach insists upon a conflict where none exists. Millay's conservative forms communicate rather than confine a modernist affect and intuition. She taps into a poetic tradition that has always expressed emotional insight through conservative poetic conventions, Her poetic restraint derives from her literary lineage a practitioner of the poetess tradition, which emerged in eighteenth-century England, achieved immense popularity in the nineteenth-century United States, and persisted, Millay demonstrates, within twentieth-century modernism. In this essay I situate Millay's early poetry collections, Renascence and Other Poems (1917) and A Few Figs from Thistles (1921), within the tradition of antebellum American poetess poetry. In doing so, I engage many of the interpretive challenges this tradition has incurred, most notably the conflation of the woman poet with her poem. (2) poetess was published and popular in the nineteenth because she appeared to offer her private thoughts to a reading public. This profession constituted both the poetess's allure and her greatest difficulty, however. Her poems had to convincingly communicate to readers the thoughts and feelings of a woman who was moral, sincere, and idealized. In other words, the poetess publicly performed her privacy, which ultimately rendered her consumable and forgettable because she relinquished the interiority that would otherwise establish her an abiding, autonomous literary figure. (3) This vexed poetess tradition inflects Millay's modernism; she redeploys the faulty expectation that women poets profess privacy in order to disrupt the ideal intimacy associated with women's poetry. While scholars have recovered and analyzed poetess poetry from the nineteenth-century United States, the lasting influence of this poetic tradition on later works has not yet been established. It is time to start drawing lines from the nineteenth-century poetess onward. In The Poet Poetess, Virginia Jackson addresses the difficulty of studying this literary figure. As a in a rather pure sense, definite and slippery a turn of phrase, the trope of the Poetess worked differently at different moments over the course of the nineteenth century (57). In this essay I offer a historical solution to the problem that Jackson identifies: the practice of ahistorically idealizing the poetess as a hologram of readerly desire (54). By investigating shifting notions of women's poetic privacy, I trace historical iterations of the poetess in order to draw her beyond the nineteenth and into the modernist period. By overtly writing within the poetess tradition, Millay, more than other comparable women modernists, made explicit the problems of private female expression in the early twentieth century. She highlighted and reclaimed the woman poet's specific inheritance in her conservative approach to modernist quandaries. …

Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination: A Study on the Power of Images and Images of Power in Works by Cervantes (review)

Reviewed by: Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination: A Study on the Power of Images and Images of Power in Works by Cervantes Pablo Fabián Baler Laguna, Ana María G. Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination: A Study on the Power of Images and Images of Power in Works by Cervantes. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2009. Pp. 175. ISBN 978-0-8387-5727-7. The complex relationship between visual arts and literature in the time (and works) of Cervantes is a topos of Cervantine criticism. Some critics have studied the interaction between specific paintings and literary passages, others were interested in underlying issues of representation, yet others have focused on the aesthetic debates surrounding the expressive scope of painting in relation to writing. Ana María Laguna contends that her book, Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination, "differentiates itself from these preceding efforts by exploring Cervantes's pictorial imagination within the context in which it was forged. [Exploring] the author's relationship to his surrounding visual culture" (14). Thus, the main thrust of this book is to supersede the pervasive scholarly approach to Cervantes as an exclusive result of High Italian Renaissance, exploring the ways in which his writing connects to the singular world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain as influenced by both Flemish and Italian art. To be sure, Laguna explores this unique combination of Flemish "realist" and Italian "idealist" influences that constituted the artistic horizon of Cervantes, in the hopes of articulating a more nuanced understanding of three aesthetic and iconographic anxieties of the period: the construction of Dulcinea's beauty in connection with Cinquecento aesthetics, the dismantling of the Neoplatonic pairing of virtue with beauty as found in El coloquio de los perros, and the overlapping of history with fiction in Don Quijote as a parody of the artistic and historical ambitions of the Habsburgs. The extent to which Laguna's investigation is, in fact, a fundamental departure from over three centuries of multitudinous scholarship could be a point worth arguing. What is more interesting, however, is to assess whether Laguna manages to formulate meaningful questions as a result of this interdisciplinary approach that brings together aesthetic, historical, and literary investigations. As it relates to the first "anxiety," Laguna explores the dyad Dulcinea/Aldonza in the context of the aesthetic debates of the sixteenth century surrounding the concept and "practice" [End Page 763] of beauty. Although the conflict between conventions and reality may very well be one of the backgrounds against which Dulcinea and Aldonza play their complicated metaphorical roles, I think the paradox relates to a broader issue of baroque aesthetics that is not quite developed in this book: the most consistent and far-reaching deconstruction operated by the novel in its double thrust to dismantle any illusions of transparency in language and to construct a grammar of the ineffable. Laguna makes a similar point in regards to the second "anxiety," the "deconstruction" of the Neoplatonic episteme. Even though Cervantes's approach to "beauty" has been traditionally linked to the idealized archetypes of Italian, Neoplatonic sources, Laguna reads El coloquio and El casamiento engañoso from a perspective that reveals the grotesque undercurrent connected to Northern aesthetics and its "distrust of the outward idealization of beauty" (68). In contrast to these previous studies on the power of images, the last chapter of the book (chapter 4) is clearly a study on images of power, since Laguna reads Don Quijote not only as a parody of a genre but also of the very representational apparatus of the Spanish empire. Here, Laguna tries to decipher a comparison, allegedly coded in Cervantes's novel, between the self-glorifying Emperor Carlos V and the pseudo knight Don Quixote. This comparison, however, although deftly articulated, can be seen more as an accumulation of poetic licenses and coincidental echoes than a scientific record of historical or literary lineage. Yet, if we suspend academic disbelief, Cervantes's novel does emerge through these associations, as "a multifaceted critique of imperial ideals and representational paradigms that 'telescope together nearly 150 years of Spanish history'" (102). Indeed, the interdisciplinary perspective of this book offers, in the final analysis, a wider and deeper perspective on two fundamental works...

Tracing Modernism's Secret Theological Pre-history: Ian Cooper's <em>The Near and Distant God</em>

Ian Cooper’s The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Holderlin to Eliot traces a genealogy of the poetic response to philosophy, beginning with Holderlin’s navigation of Kant’s aftermath, culminating with the post-Nietzschean modernisms of Rilke and T.S. Eliot. Cooper begins with a thorough analysis of Holderlin’s work, reinstating the often-overlooked theological element of his poetry. Expanding on a similar project originally undertaken by Erich Heller, Cooper includes the philosophy of the British idealists and the work of Eduard Morike and Gerard Manley Hopkins in his literary lineage, attempting to establish their importance as links in the theological pre-history of high modernism.

Otolaryngology and Irish literature: An important medico-literary alliance

For a comparatively small island, Ireland has made a disproportionately large contribution to world literature in all its aspects. The literary lineage of those who pursue medicine and also write is long and well established. The Irish contribution to world literature in all its aspects is well documented. Less explored, however, is the prominent influence of Dublin-based otolaryngologists in the Irish literary movement at the turn of the last century. Here, we examine two such figures, Sir William Wilde and Oliver St. John Gogarty, and their pivotal roles both professionally and in establishing Ireland on the world's literary stage. During the early part of the 1800s, otology was perceived as a defunct subspecialty that could be adequately managed, without much expertise, in the primary care setting. It was through the efforts of William Wilde and others that otology gained clinical and scientific credence during the latter half of the 19th century.

On Agonising: Street Charity and First Ethics

To agonise is to “undergo great mental anguish through worrying about something,” according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English. I suggest that agonising in this sense is a fundamental response to any ethical dilemma. It has a long intellectual and literary lineage. In this essay, I agonise over the dilemmas posed by street beggars, their intrusiveness and their appeal to our intuitive sense of social duty. I explore the discomfort we may feel at their presence, and the value that discomfort may have for the evolution of our ethical lives.