Why Walter Benjamin? a Brief Note on Two Operas
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Introduction
Introduction JOHN WHALEN-BRIDGE AND GARY STORHOFF BUDDHISM AND AMERICAN IMAGINED COMMUNITIES Postwar American writers rebelled in a variety of ways.1 Writers in the first twenty years after the war struggled against censorship laws and canons of taste, and court cases were fought about books dealing with sex in an explicit manner. Books such as Lolita and Catcher in the Rye were the site of censorship battles between librarians and church groups, not just because these books brought up sex as a subject, but also because they presented conventional tastes regarding literature, art, and morality as ridiculously provincial or as phony.2 Buddhist writers from this period such as J.D. Salinger, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg, to name some of the most famous Buddhist popularizers of the 1950s, did both. They experimented with a kind of formlessness in which the work took on the qualities of a mind supposed to be freer from delusion than those against which that mind was being defined. The Glass stories, Snyder’s mixing of Poundian translation and indigenous song, and Ginsberg’s charming and elegant yawp from the rooftop were all forms of complaint against mainstream society, which was felt to be crassly materialistic, a society of people too selfish to appreciate the literary celebration of generosity. In the words of Hettie Jones, the Beats were interested in Buddhism as an “antimaterialist point of view” that was “very attractive to those of us who © 2009 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff were disaffected with the organized religion we were brought up with” (Mortenson 7). -
Covenantal Poetics: Jewish, Irish, and African American Modernisms Beyond the Lyric
Covenantal Poetics: Jewish, Irish, and African American Modernisms Beyond the Lyric by Joshua Logan Wall 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 2018 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Julian Levinson, Chair Emeritus Professor Laurence Goldstein Associate Professor Joshua Miller Professor Deborah Dash Moore Associate Professor Gillian White Joshua Logan Wall [email protected] ORCID iD : 0000-0002-6983-4850 © Joshua Logan Wall 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My work on this project was supported by a variety of individuals, but a handful of institutions also deserve recognition for providing me with opportunities to conduct research. Through the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, I was supported by a Pre- Doctoral Research Fellowship, a Humanities Research Fellowship, a One-Term Dissertation Fellowship, funding for summer research, and a variety of conference travel grants that allowed me to present early versions of this research. The Department of English Language and Literature and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies also provided funding for conference travel; the Frankel Center, moreover, provided generous research and language study funding during my summers. Special collections libraries and librarians at the University of Texas, Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan were helpful and informative when I visited. I owe particular thanks to my committee members. Archival research has been a central component of this project, and Josh Miller’s advice and encouragement deserves much credit for this. He’s also among the university’s best listeners. Larry Goldstein first introduced me to the poetry of Lola Ridge. -
George Oppen's Substantives
CHRISTOPHER OAKEY George Oppen’s Substantives: The Noun as Heideggerian Formal Indicator and Grundwort When Objectivist poet George Oppen published his first collection, Discrete Series, in 1934 it included a preface in which Ezra Pound defended him against “The charge of obscurity”. This charge, Pound writes, has been raised at regular or irregular intervals since the stone age, though there is no living man who is not surprised on first learning that KEATS was considered “obscure”. It takes a very elaborate reconstruction of England in Keats’ time to erect even a shaky hypothesis regarding the probable fixations and ossifications of the then hired bureaucracy of Albermarle St., London West.1 Pound’s statement suggests that, even in its own moment, a historical perspective is needed in order to properly grasp the significance of Oppen’s collection. It takes “a very elaborate reconstruction” of Keats’s England in order to understand Keats’s past obscurity. Similarly, Pound implies, if we are to understand Oppen’s obscurity in 1934 we must recognise a distance between the contextualising poetics of a mainstream audience and the poetics of an avant- garde. Obscurity is, in Pound’s assessment, simply a by-product of a form of difference inherent to the drive to “make it new”. This obscurity belongs as much to the poems’ forms as it does to their content. As in the third poem in the collection, beginning “Thus / Hides the / Parts—the prudery / Of Frigidaire” (NCP 7), the poems of Discrete Series regularly launch from a particular fascination with the quotidian. They do so in such a way, however, that the lyric address is often obstructed by the presence of what is, both materially and linguistically, already there. -
4 Williams and Cubism - 'Al Que Quiere!', 'Sour Grapes', and 'Spring and All'
79 4 WILLIAMS AND CUBISM - 'AL QUE QUIERE!', 'SOUR GRAPES', AND 'SPRING AND ALL' But for the moment everything is fresh, perfect, recreated ... Yes, the imagination, drunk with prohibitions, has destroyed and recre~ed everything afresh in the likeness of that which it was (1:93) . In a continuation of his imagist endeavours to make everything new, Williams' cubism defamiliarizes objects in order to cleanse them from all "prohibitions" and thus recreates "everything afresh". For Williams the imagination is the primary force in this process of perception, whether in merely analyzing or decomposing an object by means of shifting planes, or in synthesizing a number of isolated elements. Williams' poetic development, however, is by no means exclusively diachronic with his imagist style, for example, developing into a cubist style. The synchronicity of his style is perhaps clearest in the co presence of imagist and cubist poems in a particular period or book. Initially these cubist signs take the form of the breaking down or fragmentation of a scene, object, or experience. Increasingly, however, Williams' style does develop towards more structured and unified presentations which would be closer to synthetic cubism. This coincides largely with a dissociation from the disarray into which imagism declined in the period after 1916. According to Perloff (1983:173), the influence of the Imagist movement (and specifically that of Pound) on Williams, although it made a difference in his development, was no longer decisive by 19172; rather, "the poems of the late teens represent Williams' first attempt to create verbal-visual counterparts to the paintings and drawings" of the visual artists3. -
NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR – Booth A20
NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR – Booth A20 A Selection of Rare Books, Manuscripts, Literary Art & Fine Printing Park Avenue Armory 643 Park Avenue (between 66/67 Streets) New York City Thursday, March 7th – Sunday, March 10th, 2019 JAMES S. JAFFE RARE BOOKS LLC 15 Academy Street P. O. Box 668 Salisbury, CT 06068 Tel: 212-988-8042 Email: [email protected] Website: www.jamesjaffe.com Member Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America / International League of Antiquarian Booksellers All items are offered subject to prior sale. Libraries will be billed to suit their budgets. Digital images are available upon request. 1. [ALLEN PRESS]. ALLEN, Lewis M. Printing With The Handpress. Herewith a Definitive Manual by Lewis M. Allen to encourage Fine Printing through Hand-craftsmanship. Small folio, illustrated, original pictorial linen, acetate dust jacket. Kentfield, CA: The Allen Press, 1969. First edition. Limited to 140 copies printed. Lewis Allen, Allen Press Bibliography, 34. A fine copy. $1,250.00 ONE OF 24 COPIES SIGNED BY THE CONTRIBUTORS 2. [ANTHOLOGY] GRAVES, Robert, editor. The Owl: A Miscellany. No. 1, May 1919 - No. 2, October 1919. Folio, illustrated, original pictorial wrappers. London: Martin Secker, 1919. First edition. One of 24 special copies of the first issue signed by many of the contributors, including Max Beerbohm, Randolph Caldecott, John Galsworthy, Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, Nancy Nicholson, William Nicholson, Robert Nichols, Siegfried Sassoon, W.J. Turner, Logan Pearsall Smith, J. C. Squire, W. H. Davies, and Eric Kennington, John Masefield, Pamela Bianco, and William Orpen, whose signatures are on small slips of paper pasted in as issued, among others. -
The Integral Actuality of Human Experience I Ian Brinton
IAN BRINTON | 155 The integral actuality of human experience I Ian Brinton Walking, a love story, Toby Olson (Occidental Square Books, 2020) Death Sentences, Toby Olson (Shearsman Books, 2019) Telescope, selected poems, Michael Heller (New York Review Books, 2019) Toby Olson’s novel is of course about movement. The movement involved in the physical process of walking reflects the movement forward from a burial in the past to an awakened awareness of the present. The overriding importance of this movement is emphasised in the epigraph to Walking, a quotation from Xenophon: Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not. That reflection is presented with uncompromising clarity in one of the early poems in Olson’s collection Death Sentences many of which are addressed to his wife, Miriam, who died in 2014: 156 | GOLDEN HANDCUFFS REVIEW About life and death, about dreaming, about the picture of you with your new bicycle, about memory: the dead’s messages written into the skins of the living. (‘Standard-18, There Will Never Be Another You’) The act of walking might seem sometimes to be the pacing of a prison cell or the claustrophobic circularity of Van Gogh’s 1890 painting of ‘Prisoners Exercising’. As Olson’s narrator Aphrodite sets out to escape the eyes of her father she is in almost constant motion even walking up and down the aisles of the occasional bus she travels on ‘getting nowhere, while the bus took me somewhere’. Trapped between the room of her dying mother and the eerily penetrating gaze of her father, Aphrodite ‘would walk out of the oppression of that space into the relative freedom of another’. -
MSA PROVISIONAL SCHEDULE-Sept 14
SESSION A: Thursday, 4:00 – 6:00 PM Seminars, 4:00 – 6:00 PM 1. What the Roast Beef Said: Object Lessons in Modernism 5th Floor LEADER: Gabrielle Moyer, Stanford University Elizabeth Anderson, University of Glasgow Claire Battershill, University of Toronto Bill Brown, University of Chicago Stuart Burrows, Brown University Alan Clinton, University of Miami Hilary Edwards, Florida Atlantic University Rohanna Green, University of Toronto Margaret Konkol, SUNY Buffalo Jennifer Levin, University of California, Irvine Zena Meadowsong, Stanford University Matthew Mutter, Yale University Tim Newcomb, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Shawna Ross, Pennsylvania State University Paul Saunders, Queen’s University Matt Strohack, Queen’s University Leigh Wilson, University of Westminster 2. Teaching the Magazines of Modernism 5th Floor LEADER: Robert Scholes, Yale University, and Mark Gaipa, Harvard University David Ben-Merre, Buffalo State College Bradford Campbell, Cal Poly State University W. Scott Cheney, Loyola University Suzanne Churchill, Davidson College Jeffrey Drouin, CUNY Graduate Center Sarah Fedirka, Arizona State University Lee Garver, Butler University Barbara Green, University of Notre Dame Thomas Haakenson, Minneapolis College of Art and Design Christina Hauck, Kansas State University Catherine Keyser, University of South Carolina Celena Kusch, University of South Carolina Upstate Jeremy Larance, West Liberty University Catherine Paul, Clemson University Patrick Redding, Yale University 3. New Modernisms in Canada 5th Floor LEADER: -
Uncertain Poetries
Uncertain Poetries Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic whose books include Es- chaton, Beckmann Variations & Other Poems, Speaking The Estranged: Essays On The Work Of George Oppen, and Earth and Cave, a memoir of Spain in the ’60s. His most recent volume is This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965–2010. Among his many awards are the Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America and grants from the National Endowment, NYFA and The Fund for Poetry. Also by Michael Heller Poetry Two Poems Accidental Center Knowledge Figures of Speaking In the Builded Place Marginalia In A Desperate Hand Wordflow Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems A Look At The Door With The Hinges Off Eschaton Beckmann Variations & other poems This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965–2010 Prose Earth and Cave Living Root: A Memoir Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study Essays Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen Editor Carl Rakosi: Man and Poet Poets Poems #21 Uncertain Poetries Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics Michael Heller Shearsman Books This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Shearsman Books 50 Westons Hill Drive Emersons Green Bristol BS16 7DF Shearsman Books Ltd Registered Office 30–31 St. James Place, Mangotsfield, Bristol BS16 9JB (this address not for correspondence) ISBN 978-1-84861-218-1 Copyright © Michael Heller, 2004, 2012 The right of Michael Heller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. -
Armand Schwerner Papers
http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0t1n97k3 No online items Armand Schwerner Papers Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Copyright 2005 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla 92093-0175 [email protected] URL: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/collections/sca/index.html Armand Schwerner Papers MSS 0485 1 Descriptive Summary Languages: English Contributing Institution: Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla 92093-0175 Title: Armand Schwerner Papers Identifier/Call Number: MSS 0485 Physical Description: 35 Linear feet (74 archives boxes, 12 card file boxes, 2 flat boxes, and 6 oversize folders) Date (inclusive): 1945 - 1999 Abstract: Papers of Armand Schwerner, poet, performance artist, musician, translator, editor and professor of literature. The papers contain correspondence, drafts of published and unpublished poetry and prose, journals, notes, translations, reviews and editorial work. Schwerner's readings and performances are represented by flyers, text, photographs, and audio and videorecordings. Also included are drafts of writings of others and subject files related his interest in Buddhism, and various biographical documents. Scope and Content of Collection The Armand Schwerner Papers document all stages of his life and intermingled activities as a poet, playwright, translator, performer and teacher. The papers contain manuscript and typescript drafts of Schwerner's prose and poetry, including his long serial poem The Tablets, published collected poetry and unpublished -
THE MESSIANIC TURN in POSTWAR AMERICAN POETRY by Patrick
WRITING THE DISASTERS: THE MESSIANIC TURN IN POSTWAR AMERICAN POETRY by Patrick John Pritchett B.A., University of Colorado, 2001 M.A., University of Colorado, 2004 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English 2011 This thesis entitled: Writing the Disasters: The Messianic Turn in Postwar American Poetry written by Patrick John Pritchett has been approved for the Department of English __________________________________ Jeremy Green __________________________________ Karen Jacobs Date _____________ The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. iii Pritchett, Patrick John (Ph.D., English) The Writing of the Disasters: The Messianic Turn in Postwar American Poetry Thesis directed by Associate Professor Jeremy Green Writing the Disasters: The Messianic Turn in Postwar American Poetry looks at how postwar avant-garde poets adopt Jewish textual tropes in their search for forms capable of regenerating the ruins of language after the catastrophe of Auschwitz. This study will show how three major postwar poets, George Oppen, Michael Palmer, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, employ these tropes to critique the culture of disaster, from the Holocaust to the Cold War‘s perpetual state of emergency. Working within the Objectivist tradition of adherence to things through rigorous perception, each poet stakes his or her claim for radical form‘s ethical engagement with history as outlined by Theodor Adorno‘s call for a new categorical imperative after Auschwitz: nothing less than the interruption of the hypnotic spell wrought by the homogeneity of everyday speech and kept intact by the logic of the disaster. -
Melville, Zukofsky, and America's Lost Epic Tradition By
No American Miltons: Melville, Zukofsky, and America‘s Lost Epic Tradition By Timothy Clayton Wood A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael A. Bernstein, Chair Professor Samuel Otter Professor Lyn Hejinian Professor Richard Cándida Smith Fall 2010 No American Miltons: Melville, Zukofsky, and America‘s Lost Epic Tradition © 2010 By Timothy Clayton Wood 1 Abstract No American Miltons: Melville, Zukofsky, and America‘s Lost Epic Tradition By Timothy Clayton Wood Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael A. Bernstein, Chair No American Miltons: Melville, Zukofsky, and America‟s Lost Epic Tradition explores the exigencies of the epic traditions in American poetry. I examine the novelization of the epic and the concomitant lyricization of poetry within American literary history before positing an extant albeit chthonic epic tradition best exemplified in the 19th century by Herman Melville‘s Clarel and in the 20th century by Louis Zukofsky‘s “A”. I argue that while the epic tradition stemming from Wordsworth through Whitman and on to Pound is indeed defunct, an alternative epic tradition exemplified by Melville and Zukofsky‘s use of Milton is alive and well, although it goes unrecognized. I ground my notions of epic in the prevailing discourses about the genre in 20th century American literary criticism and link my definitions to the basic tenets outlined by Aristotle. By offering provisional definitions of epic, yet ones specific enough to justify the use of what has often been a contentious term, I attempt to bring aspects of the poems that often go unnoticed into relief so that otherwise seemingly unrelated poetic projects can be realigned and understood as part of a tradition that tests the critical reception of epic in general, and Clarel and “A” in particular. -
William Carlos Williams in the 1930S
1 William Carlos Williams in the 1930s Robert L.G. Tucker University College London English Language and Literature Ph.D. 2 I, Robert L.G. Tucker, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 Abstract The subject of this thesis is William Carlos Williams and the circle of writers around him in the 1930s. During this decade Williams was a key figure in the formation of an alternative left-wing American canon, and active in a group that included Nathanael West, Louis Zukofsky and Kenneth Burke. This thesis explores the political and aesthetic grounds on which that canon was constructed. The assumption that Williams was already a successful writer after Spring and All (1923) has often led to a disproportionate emphasis on his poetry and the ‘modernist’ aspects of his aesthetics. This thesis makes the case for the significance of Williams’ 1930s prose writings in the growth of the Proletarian Literature movement, and challenges the assumption that ‘Marxist’ literature of the 1930s was at odds with ‘modernist’ literature of the 1920s. I investigate the key concepts of Williams’ own aesthetic philosophy, ‘Objectivism,’ ‘Pragmatism,’ ‘Contact,’ and ‘Localism,’ and show how these concepts became politicized during the 1930s. By exploring the relationship between art and politics, and the ways in which Williams was radicalized by the Great Depression, this thesis attempts to expand critical notions of ‘radicalism’ to include a broader New Deal alliance between traditional democratic liberalism and Marxist economic determinism.