DOCSLIB.ORG

Writing Communities: Aesthetics, Politics, and Late Modernist Literary Consolidation

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Writing Communities: Aesthetics, Politics, and Late Modernist Literary Consolidation WRITING COMMUNITIES: AESTHETICS, POLITICS, AND LATE MODERNIST LITERARY CONSOLIDATION by Elspeth Egerton Healey A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2008 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor John A. Whittier-Ferguson, Chair Associate Professor Kali A. K. Israel Associate Professor Joshua L. Miller Assistant Professor Andrea Patricia Zemgulys © Elspeth Egerton Healey _____________________________________________________________________________ 2008 Acknowledgements I have been incredibly fortunate throughout my graduate career to work closely with the amazing faculty of the University of Michigan Department of English. I am grateful to Marjorie Levinson, Martha Vicinus, and George Bornstein for their inspiring courses and probing questions, all of which were integral in setting this project in motion. The members of my dissertation committee have been phenomenal in their willingness to give of their time and advice. Kali Israel’s expertise in the constructed representations of (auto)biographical genres has proven an invaluable asset, as has her enthusiasm and her historian’s eye for detail. Beginning with her early mentorship in the Modernisms Reading Group, Andrea Zemgulys has offered a compelling model of both nuanced scholarship and intellectual generosity. Joshua Miller’s amazing ability to extract the radiant gist from still inchoate thought has meant that I always left our meetings with a renewed sense of purpose. I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my dissertation chair, John Whittier-Ferguson. His incisive readings, astute guidance, and ready laugh have helped to sustain this project from beginning to end. The life of a graduate student can sometimes be measured by bowls of ramen noodles and hours of grading. The generous fellowship support of the University of Michigan Department of English and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies has enabled me to partake of these graduate staples according to my own appetite rather than by necessity. Paul, John, Mona, Olivia and all of my wonderful co-workers at the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership have provided me with a rejuvenating early modern sojourn from twentieth century writing. Some of the most exciting and intellectually fulfilling moments of my work on this project have come while combing through Intercultural Publications memos, William Carlos Williams prescription pad notes, and early New Directions publicity materials. I am greatly indebted to the generosity of Indiana University’s Lilly Library, whose Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship supported a month-long research trip to work with the fascinating Intercultural Publications Mss. I must also ii thank the librarians at the University of Buffalo’s Lockwood Memorial Library and Harvard University’s Houghton Library for their assistance during my visits to their respective William Carlos Williams and New Directions Publishing Corp./James Laughlin collections. All three libraries proved such enticing environments that they have convinced me to make a career of working in archives and special collections. My graduate experience has been infinitely enriched by the remarkable cohort of women with whom I entered the English Ph.D program. I am constantly awed by the brilliance of their intellects and the depth of their kindness. Marjorie Rubright and Laura Ambrose were the first friends I made in Ann Arbor, and they have encouraged me with their insightful feedback, gift for gab, and willingness to indulge my sweet tooth. My Victorianist heroes Ji-Hyae Park and Latha Reddy diligently read the draftiest of drafts and have been my compatriots in all things silly and frivolous. The immediacy of the friendship of Lauren LaFauci and Rebecca Smith has not been diminished by their geographic relocations; their telephone calls have offered an important lifeline during these past years of writing. My fellow modernists Emily Lutenski and Jenny Sorensen have inspired me with their thinking on twentieth century literature. Tamara Bhalla, John Cords, and Gavin Hollis have ensured that I took study breaks for feasts consisting of Spanish Tortillas and outlandish cocktails. Thank you to my Lovely Television Ladies for camaraderie and cupcakes, and especially to Taryn Hakala and Casie LeGette, whose fabulous company made my final year of writing more enjoyable than I could have hoped. Finally, I would like to thank my wonderful family. My sister Emma’s patience in offering last-minute feedback on my French translations is matched only by her unshakeable support of all of my intellectual endeavors. Throughout my academic career, my parents have always graciously refrained from asking, “So, when are you going to get a job?” and have instead volunteered intellectual, emotional, and material support far beyond what any adult daughter could expect. My father’s tireless scouring of University of Toronto library book sales has meant that I always come home to a surprise trove of literary delights. I have used many of his finds (including the Riding and iii Graves first edition!) in the course of writing this dissertation. Since my childhood, my mother has provided me with an inspiring exemplar of passion for and dedication to the work of the mind. Her endless energy makes me hopeful for the years ahead! It is to my family—Emma, Robin, and Toni—that I dedicate this dissertation. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii List of Figures vi Introduction: Writing Communities 1 I. Notes Towards (and Away from) a Definition of Community 7 II. Late Modernism / Belated Modernism 15 III. Making Modernisms 21 IV. Overlapping Communities, Overlapping Inquiries 26 Chapter 1. Left Bank Legacies: Modernist Memoir’s Communal Economy 30 I. Conversations across the Page: Drawing the Discursive Field of Modernist Memoir 32 II. (The Problem with) Being Geniuses Together 43 III. Starring Roles at the Moveable Feast: Modernist Memoir and the Discourse of Celebrity 62 Chapter 2. Letting the Colors Run: William Carlos Williams and the Negotiation of Local and Literary Community 96 I. 9 Ridge Road: Williams and his Local Community 99 II. The Paper Forum: Williams and Literary Community 108 III. Conjunctions and Disjunctions: The Question of Community in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams 112 IV. Being the Locus: Paterson as a Site of Conversation 122 Chapter 3. Publishing the Revolution of the Word: New Directions’ Consolidation of the Communities of the ‘New’ 145 I. New Directions: Politics and the Experimental Writer 153 II. The Ancestral (and Filial) New: Re-envisioning the Temporal and National Parameters of the Modern Movement 167 Chapter 4. Institutionalizing Anti-Institutionalism: The Paradox of Perspectives USA’s Cold War Modernism 193 I. Formal Skirmishes 196 II. Modeling Nationalist / Internationalist Modernism 204 III. National Representatives: (Mis)adventures in Synecdoche 210 IV. Shifting Paradigms 222 V. Ezra Pound: A Case Study in Clashing Cultures 231 Conclusion: Modernist Redux 242 Bibliography 247 v List of Figures Figure 1.1 Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare and Company. 93 1.2 Adrienne Monnier in her bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres. 94 1.3 The man in the shadow and the man in the sun: Robert McAlmon (left) and Ernest Hemingway in a Spanish bullring, 1923. 95 1. 4 Journalist and publisher William Bird. 95 3.1 Spearhead ad published in The Nation in November 1947. 191 3.2. New Classics book jacket for Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (NC 11 1946); design by Alvin Lustig. 192 3.3. New Classics book jacket for Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales (NC 7 ca. 1945); design by Alvin Lustig. 192 4.1 Part of the table of contents for the first issue of Perspektiven, Perspectives USA’s German language edition. 239 4.2 The cover of the American edition of Perspectives USA, No. 2 (Winter 1953). 240 4.3 Perspectives USA, No. 8 (Summer 1954) was the last issue to feature the words “art music literature” on the cover. 240 4.4 The cover of Perspectives USA, No. 10 (Winter 1955). 240 4.5 The covers of Perspectives USA, No. 13 and 14. 241 vi Introduction: Writing Communities Writing on the neglect of tradition in After Strange Gods (1934), T.S. Eliot declared, “What is disastrous is that the writer should deliberately give rein to his ‘individuality’, that he should even cultivate his differences from others; and that his readers should cherish the author of genius, not in spite of his deviations from the inherited wisdom of the race, but because of them.”1 This moment signals a development in Eliot’s communalist turn, his increasing preoccupation with the bonds of collectivity offered by religious and (for him, European) cultural tradition. Though many of his fellow writers would take issue with the particular tenor of Eliot’s assessments in After Strange Gods, they too were increasingly contemplating the tensions between innovation and tradition, individuation and association. Indeed, the 1930s and the subsequent wartime years stand as a period during which contrasting visions of community dominated the social and political landscape. Communism, Left-ism, New Deal politics, and Fascism (to span the political spectrum) all diverged from Liberalism’s emphasis on the individual to refocus attention on the social body. Community accordingly re-emerged as a live topic of both political and aesthetic debate. Writing Communities: Aesthetics, Politics, and Late Modernist Literary Consolidation sets out to examine several key late modernist re-articulations of literary community that occurred alongside and in conversation with the era’s more recognizable politicized communities. It argues that late modernist constitutions of literary community entailed not only an aesthetic response to and corrective of a 1920s strain of individualism, but also a self-conscious attempt to influence the paradigms and figures by which modernist communities were beginning to enter into cultural memory. 1 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1934), 33. The collection is a print version of the speeches that Eliot delivered as the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in 1933.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Irish Authors Collections Guide 18 August 2020 English Literature Is One of the Two Greatest Strengths of the Rosenbach's Libr
    Irish Authors Collections Guide 18 August 2020 English Literature is one of the two greatest strengths of the Rosenbach’s library collections (the other being American history). What we usually call English Literature is more precisely the English-language literature of Great Britain, Ireland, and surrounding islands. Some of the greatest writers in the English language have been Irish. Dr. Rosenbach certainly recognized this, and although we don't know that he had a special interest in Irish writers as such, it means that he did collect a number of them. His interest was chiefly in pre-20th-century literature, so apart from James Joyce there are few recent writers represented. Although they are not segregated by country of origin on the Rosenbach shelves, this guide highlights Irish authors as a particular sub-set of English-language authors. The guide is arranged in alphabetical order by author’s last name, and in the instances of James Joyce, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde, the list is further broken down by collections category. Throughout this guide, all objects owned by Dr. Rosenbach are marked with an asterisk (*). Those marked with double (**) are part of Philip Rosenbach’s gift to the Foundation on January 12, 1953, consisting partly of objects from Dr. Rosenbach’s estate. This guide will be updated periodically to reflect new acquisitions and further cataloging of the Rosenbach collections. Objects acquired since 2014 are marked with a “+”. For further information on any item listed on this collections guide, please contact us at https://rosenbach.org/research/make-an-inquiry/. For information about on-site research, or to request an appointment to see specific materials, visit http://rosenbach.org/research/make-an- appointment/.
    [Show full text]
  • Writers' Correspondence Not Yet Entered Into the Repository June 2016 Maine State Library
    Maine State Library Maine State Documents Maine Writers Correspondence Maine State Library Special Collections June 2016 Writers' Correspondence Not Yet Entered Into the Repository June 2016 Maine State Library Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalmaine.com/maine_writers_correspondence Recommended Citation Maine State Library, "Writers' Correspondence Not Yet Entered Into the Repository June 2016" (2016). Maine Writers Correspondence. 847. http://digitalmaine.com/maine_writers_correspondence/847 This Text is brought to you for free and open access by the Maine State Library Special Collections at Maine State Documents. It has been accepted for inclusion in Maine Writers Correspondence by an authorized administrator of Maine State Documents. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Maine Writer’s Correspondence Project Files not yet Digitized For more information or to obtain the contents of any of these folders please contact the Maine State Library referencedesk @ Maine.gov Entries include a typed letter of correspondence from the Maine State Adelaide V. Finch Library Entries include a brief biography, typed letters on personal and literary stationery, a card with the image of a covered bridge a short distance from potato houses, newspaper clippings, and a leaflet from the 1956 State of Adelbert M. Jakeman Maine Writers' Conference. Entries include a publisher advertisement clipping, a typed biography, a newspaper clipping of Bushnell's obituary with her photographic image, and Adelyn Bushnell a typed biographical letter Entries include brief biographical information and a typed biographical Agnes Cope Foote letter on Tory Row Bookshop, Cambridge, Massachusetts, stationery Entries include typed letters of correspondence from the Maine State Albert E.
    [Show full text]
  • A Humble Protest a Literary Generation's Quest for The
    A HUMBLE PROTEST A LITERARY GENERATION’S QUEST FOR THE HEROIC SELF, 1917 – 1930 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jason A. Powell, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2008 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Steven Conn, Adviser Professor Paula Baker Professor David Steigerwald _____________________ Adviser Professor George Cotkin History Graduate Program Copyright by Jason Powell 2008 ABSTRACT Through the life and works of novelist John Dos Passos this project reexamines the inter-war cultural phenomenon that we call the Lost Generation. The Great War had destroyed traditional models of heroism for twenties intellectuals such as Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos, compelling them to create a new understanding of what I call the “heroic self.” Through a modernist, experience based, epistemology these writers deemed that the relationship between the heroic individual and the world consisted of a dialectical tension between irony and romance. The ironic interpretation, the view that the world is an antagonistic force out to suppress individual vitality, drove these intellectuals to adopt the Freudian conception of heroism as a revolt against social oppression. The Lost Generation rebelled against these pernicious forces which they believed existed in the forms of militarism, patriotism, progressivism, and absolutism. The
    [Show full text]
  • The Sun Also Rises a Book Catalogue from Capitol Hill Books and Riverby Books
    The Sun Also Rises A Book Catalogue from Capitol Hill Books and Riverby Books January 27, 2017 On Hemingway, the Lost Generation, Cocktails, and Bullfighting This winter, Shakespeare Theater Company will perform The Select, a play based on Ernest Hemingway’s iconic novel The Sun Also Rises. To kick off the performance, Capitol Hill Books and Riverby Books have joined forces to assemble a collection of books and other materials related to Hemingway and the “Lost Generation.” Our catalog includes various editions (rare, medium rare, and reading copies) of all of Hemingway’s major works, and many associated materials. For instance, we have a program from a 1925 bullfight in Barcelona, vintage cocktail books, a two volume Exotic Cooking and Drinking Book, and an array of books from Hemingway’s peers and mentors. On Jan. 27th, the Pen Faulkner Foundation, the Shakespeare Theater Company, and the Hill Center are hosting an evening retrospective of Hemingway’s writing. Throughout the evening, actors, scholars, and writers will read, praise, and excoriate Hemingway. Meanwhile mixologists will sling drinks with a Hemingway theme, and we will be there to discuss Gertrude Stein, bullfighting, Death in the Gulfstream, and to talk and sell books. All of the materials in this catalog will be for sale there, and both Riverby and Capitol Hill Books will have displays at our stores set up throughout the month of February. So grab a glass of Pernod, browse through the catalog, and let us know if anything is of interest to you. Contact information is below. We hope to see you on the 27th, but if not come by the shop or give us a call.
    [Show full text]
  • 'A True Magic Chamber': the Public Face of the Modernist Bookshop
    ‘A True Magic Chamber’: The Public Face of the Modernist Bookshop Andrew Thacker Modernist Cultures 11.3 (2016): 429–451 DOI: 10.3366/mod.2016.0149 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/loi/mod Abstract This article explores the role of bookshops in the construction of a public for modernism and analyses a number of bookshops committed to promoting modernist culture, such as those run by Sylvia Beach (Shakespeare and Company), Adrienne Monnier (La Maison des Amis des Livres), and Frances Steloff (Gotham Book Mart). It also considers how the bookshop is a fulcrum between commerce and culture, a key issue for contemporary modernist studies, and discusses aspects of bookshop culture that seem to operate ‘beyond’ the market. One example is that of We Moderns, a catalogue issued by the Gotham Book Mart in 1940 and which represents a fascinating example of the print culture of the modernist bookshop. Drawing upon the work of Mark Morrisson and Lawrence Rainey, the article also evaluates the position of the bookshop within debates around modernism and the public sphere. The Business of the Magic Chamber A member of the public strolling through Paris in the early 1920s who drifts onto the Left Bank in search of culture, might find themselves in the triangle of small streets between the grander avenues of Boulevard St. Michel and the Boulevard St. Germain in the 6th Arrondissement. These are the streets around the Sorbonne and, as such, there are many bookshops servicing the university. Thinking it might be fun to buy a book, a modern or contemporary book, they stroll up Rue de l'Odéon, across from the National Theatre, spying a likely looking bookshop and decide to enter.
    [Show full text]
  • Why Iot Is a Marvelous Work of Art
    Journal of Literature and Art Studies, January 2021, Vol. 11, No. 1, 62-70 doi: 10.17265/2159-5836/2021.01.010 D DAVID PUBLISHING Covers and Contents: Why iot is a Marvelous Work of Art Peter L. Hays University of California, Davis, USA iot (1924) was a remarkable artistic achievement. Following collages in the works of Picasso, Braque, and Gris, publisher Bill Bird created a collage of newspaper headlines on the cover of that slim volume that linked to the collage of vignettes within that Hemingway wrote. Both depicted a world losing traditional values, torn by war and despair and increasing commercialism. Subsequent Hemingway book covers by Scribners, at least until The Old Man and the Sea, emphasized sales over art and had little to do with content. Keywords: Hemingway, iot, collage, modernist art Introduction The cover of Ernest Hemingway’s 1924 in our time—behind the lower-case title, lower-case author’s name, publisher’s colophon, and lower-case press name—is a collage of newspaper snippets.1 Only 170 copies of the book survived pristine printing on handmade Rives paper, of the 300 planned, with 120 having the watermark of the paper appear under the frontispiece. 1924 was an advanced year for Cubist collages by Picasso and Braque, both of whom incorporated bits of printed material, often newspapers, into their works of art (“collage” from the French for “to glue”). Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1911-12) features imitation chaircaning on oilcloth surrounded by a frame of actual rope, and on the chair caning one can read the letters J.O.U., which can be a pun on jouer, to play, which both artists were doing with their collages.
    [Show full text]
  • BTC Catalog 172.Pdf
    Between the Covers Rare Books, Inc. ~ Catalog 172 ~ First Books & Before 112 Nicholson Rd., Gloucester City NJ 08030 ~ (856) 456-8008 ~ [email protected] Terms of Sale: Images are not to scale. All books are returnable within ten days if returned in the same condition as sent. Books may be reserved by telephone, fax, or email. All items subject to prior sale. Payment should accompany order if you are unknown to us. Customers known to us will be invoiced with payment due in 30 days. Payment schedule may be adjusted for larger purchases. Institutions will be billed to meet their requirements. We accept checks, VISA, MASTERCARD, AMERICAN EXPRESS, DISCOVER, and PayPal. Gift certificates available. Domestic orders from this catalog will be shipped gratis via UPS Ground or USPS Priority Mail; expedited and overseas orders will be sent at cost. All items insured. NJ residents please add 7% sales tax. Member ABAA, ILAB. Artwork by Tom Bloom. © 2011 Between the Covers Rare Books, Inc. www.betweenthecovers.com After 171 catalogs, we’ve finally gotten around to a staple of the same). This is not one of them, nor does it pretend to be. bookselling industry, the “First Books” catalog. But we decided to give Rather, it is an assemblage of current inventory with an eye toward it a new twist... examining the question, “Where does an author’s career begin?” In the The collecting sub-genre of authors’ first books, a time-honored following pages we have tried to juxtapose first books with more obscure tradition, is complicated by taxonomic problems – what constitutes an (and usually very inexpensive), pre-first book material.
    [Show full text]
  • Gertrude Stein and Her Audience: Small Presses, Little Magazines, and the Reconfiguration of Modern Authorship
    GERTRUDE STEIN AND HER AUDIENCE: SMALL PRESSES, LITTLE MAGAZINES, AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF MODERN AUTHORSHIP KALI MCKAY BACHELOR OF ARTS, UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE, 2006 A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies of the University of Lethbridge in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS Department of English University of Lethbridge LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA, CANADA © Kali McKay, 2010 Abstract: This thesis examines the publishing career of Gertrude Stein, an American expatriate writer whose experimental style left her largely unpublished throughout much of her career. Stein’s various attempts at dissemination illustrate the importance she placed on being paid for her work and highlight the paradoxical relationship between Stein and her audience. This study shows that there was an intimate relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture as demonstrated by Stein’s need for the public recognition and financial gains by which success had long been measured. Stein’s attempt to embrace the definition of the author as a professional who earned a living through writing is indicative of the developments in art throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and it problematizes modern authorship by re- emphasizing the importance of commercial success to artists previously believed to have been indifferent to the reaction of their audience. iii Table of Contents Title Page ………………………………………………………………………………. i Signature Page ………………………………………………………………………… ii Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………….. iii Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………….. iv Chapter One …………………………………………………………………………..... 1 Chapter Two ………………………………………………………………………….. 26 Chapter Three ………………………………………………………………………… 47 Chapter Four .………………………………………………………………………... 66 Works Cited .………………………………………………………………………….. 86 iv Chapter One Hostile readers of Gertrude Stein’s work have frequently accused her of egotism, claiming that she was a talentless narcissist who imposed her maunderings on the public with an undeserved sense of self-satisfaction.
    [Show full text]
  • Barney Rosset by Win Mccormack
    A Conversation with Barney Rosset by Win McCormack its heyday, the most influential alternative book press in the history of American publishing. Grove—and Grove’s magazine, the Evergreen Review, launched in 1957—published, among other writers, most of the French avant-garde of the era, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco; most of the American Beats of the fifties, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg; and most of the key radical political thinkers of the six- ties, including Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Regis Debray. He pub- lished Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot after it had been scorned by more mainstream publishers—and sold two million copies of it in the bargain. He made a specialty of Japanese literature, and intro- duced the future Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe to an American public. He published the first unexpurgated edition of D. H. Law- A CONVERSATION WITH rence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the first edition of Henry Miller’s BARNEY ROSSET Tropic of Cancer in America, partly to deliberately provoke the censors. Through his legal victories in the resulting obscenity cases, as well as in one brought on by I Am Curious (Yellow), a sexually explicit Swedish Win McCormack documentary film he distributed, he was probably more responsible than any other single individual for ending the censorship of litera- ture and film in the United States. In bestowing on Barney Rosset the honorific of Commandeur dans Grove Press was sold in 1985; its backlist is now part of Grove/ l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1999, the French Ministry of Cul- Atlantic Inc.
    [Show full text]
  • University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting Template
    STEREOTYPE, AMBIVALENCE, AND INTERPRETATION: BLACK MALE IDENTITY IN THE FILMS BORDERLINE AND LOOKING FOR LANGSTON By HAILIE MARIE BRYANT A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2010 1 © 2010 Hailie Marie Bryant 2 To Teri 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis has been an incredible learning experience and could not have been completed without the guidance and support of my faculty mentors, family, and friends. I would like to thank my committee chair, Amy Ongiri, for her continued patience and commitment to this project. Her breadth of knowledge concerning film and cultural studies has been especially helpful during my journey. I would also like to thank my committee co-chair, Tace Hedrick, for providing a dynamic learning experience in her seminars and for always pushing me to work through difficult material with wisdom. I am indebted to both Dr. Ongiri and Dr. Hedrick for truly helping me to become a more confident writer and researcher. Outside of the University of Florida community, I would like to extend my gratitude to my family and friends for helping me remain optimistic and focused during this journey. I would like to thank my husband, Shane, for always being my rock and keeping me sane and lighthearted. I would also like to thank my daughter, Sydnee, for being a bright shining reminder of youthful optimism. Finally, I would like to thank the Mercers, the Stoner-Perrys, the Schmuckers, and the Baltozers for their help and support.
    [Show full text]
  • Throughout His Writing Career, Nelson Algren Was Fascinated by Criminality
    RAGGED FIGURES: THE LUMPENPROLETARIAT IN NELSON ALGREN AND RALPH ELLISON by Nathaniel F. Mills A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Alan M. Wald, Chair Professor Marjorie Levinson Professor Patricia Smith Yaeger Associate Professor Megan L. Sweeney For graduate students on the left ii Acknowledgements Indebtedness is the overriding condition of scholarly production and my case is no exception. I‘d like to thank first John Callahan, Donn Zaretsky, and The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust for permission to quote from Ralph Ellison‘s archival material, and Donadio and Olson, Inc. for permission to quote from Nelson Algren‘s archive. Alan Wald‘s enthusiasm for the study of the American left made this project possible, and I have been guided at all turns by his knowledge of this area and his unlimited support for scholars trying, in their writing and in their professional lives, to negotiate scholarship with political commitment. Since my first semester in the Ph.D. program at Michigan, Marjorie Levinson has shaped my thinking about critical theory, Marxism, literature, and the basic protocols of literary criticism while providing me with the conceptual resources to develop my own academic identity. To Patricia Yaeger I owe above all the lesson that one can (and should) be conceptually rigorous without being opaque, and that the construction of one‘s sentences can complement the content of those sentences in productive ways. I see her own characteristic synthesis of stylistic and conceptual fluidity as a benchmark of criticism and theory and as inspiring example of conceptual creativity.
    [Show full text]
  • The Yale University Jean Toomer Papers
    The Yale University Jean Toomer papers http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/beinecke.TOOMER.con.html The Jean Toomer Papers contain correspondence; multiple drafts of unpublished books, essays, and other writings; and personal papers documenting the life of Jean Toomer. The papers span the years 1898-1963, but the bulk of the material dates from 1920-1954. Unfortunately, few manuscripts from Toomer's Harlem Renaissance period are preserved. Instead the papers are primarily drafts of his later, philosophical writings. Related papers written by his first wife, Margery Latimer, and transcripts of lectures given by his spiritual mentor, Georges Gurdjieff, as well as typescript drafts of Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson can also be found in the collection. The Jean Toomer Papers were donated to The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library by Marjorie Content Toomer in 1980 and transferred to Yale in 1985-88 from Fisk University, where they had been on deposit since 1962. Most of the papers were stamped, numbered, labelled, and annotated with dates and names at Fisk University. Most drafts in the collection were written on highly acidic paper and are in poor condition. Preservation photocopies have been made of all fragile correspondence, notes, and final drafts. Newspaper clippings have also been copied. Series I,Correspondence (Boxes 1-10) is divided into two sections: Jean Toomer and Margery Latimer Toomer. The correspondence of Jean Toomer includes letters from Margery Latimer Toomer, as well as letters to and from Marjorie Content Toomer. Correspondence from his mother, Nina Pinchback Toomer, contains a transcript of her letter to Nathan Toomer in 1897 asking for a divorce (Box 8, folder 262).
    [Show full text]