Matthew Hart. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacula... more Matthew Hart. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing. Oxford UP, 2010.Matthew Hart's Nations of Nothing but Poetry contributes to the growing field of transnational criticism, joining such studies as Anita Patterson's Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Jahan Ramazani's Transnational Poetics (U of Chicago P, 2009). Although Hart derives his main concept of the synthetic vernacular from the poetics of Hugh MacDiarmid, he persuasively explains why the concept also applies to Basil Bunting, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Melvin Toison.Drawing on Edward Sapir's belief that "'provincial' language is a fundamental element of literary art," Hart zeroes in on the contradiction between the materiality of language, particularly in the form of dialects, and the universal appeal of successful literature (8). To explain what he means by "synthetic vernacular," he draws on Adorno's claim that "the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived." Hart equates Adorno's concept with "the idea of a language that articulates some collective sense of nationality," while he correlates the thing conceived with the "actual" poetic discourse of nationhood (8). From this perspective, the vernacular can only be synthetic because the sign is never wholly adequate to the concept. Focusing on this divide, Hart explores how different poets from both sides of the Atlantic forge distinctive idioms in relation to their specific dreams of nationhood. He relates his study to modernism's preoccupation with mimesis by examining the way his poets "strain the representational norms of vernacular language to the breaking point, thereby registering the contradictoriness - and uncanny durability - of the politics of locality in a transnational age" (16).Hart views MacDiarmid's "Synthetic Scots poetry as a creative solution to the problem of reconciling Scottish nationalism and socialist internationalism" (52). He argues that this solution is only partially effective because of Scotland's contradictory status as a partner in promoting the British Empire and as a victim of English linguistic domination. The characteristic gesture of a MacDiarmid poem is always double, as in the following example: "Noisy, inorganic, and dredged up from textbooks and dictionaries, the language of 'On a Raised Beach' . . . binds language to a place . . . and yet reveals it to be always out of place, forever rejoining and remaking the world" (67). To explain this dynamic, Hart contrasts MacDiarmid's method with Pound' s in Cathay: "Rather than comprising a systematic reflection on the contemporarneity of an ethnohistorical type, the 'nexus of personae' at work in MacDiarmid's Scots poems are part of a catch-as-catch-can program to 'represent an alternative Scot' in the present moment" (65). Hart sees this as laudable but also notices that it undercuts the political efficacy of MacDiarmid's thought. In the long run, for MacDiarmid, "poetry ... is the true test of politics, its forms and languages allowing for imaginative complexities far greater than those encompassed by mere theory." Unfortunately, however, "this aesthetic victory has little parallel at the level of activism or political theory" (77).In his chapter on Bunting, Hart tries to account for the paradox of what the poet "called 'a dialect written in the spelling of the capital' - a Northumbrian vernacular verse, that is, which looks like Standard English" (79). As with MacDiarmid, Hart detects a regional cosmopolitanism at workin Bunting's writing, a quality he connects to synthetic vernacularism. For Hart, the chief tension driving Bunting's poetry is the tension between the dialect of the spoken word and the potential durability of the written word. His poem Briggflatts "never engages with graphic forms of writing without also troubling their suitability for recording a life and defining a Northumbrian poetics" (88). …
"The finest short stories are those that raise, in short, one particular man or woman, from ... more "The finest short stories are those that raise, in short, one particular man or woman, from that Gehenna, the newspapers, where at last all men are equal, to the distinction of being an individual. To be responsive not to the ordinances of the herd (Russia-like) but to the extraordinary responsibility of being a person."-William Carlos Williams, "A Beginning on the Short Story (Notes)""He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing."-Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass"The world's an orphan's home."-Marianne Moore, "In Distrust of Merits"In his 1938 short-story collection Life Along the Passaic River, Wil- liams emphasizes the discrepancy between realist verisimilitude and modernist self-reflexivity to dramatize the plight of the poor due to general economic conditions, particularly through the metaphor of the orphan. In addition, figurations of family, both positive and negative, offer an imaginative survey of possibilities and pitfalls for remedying the orphan's predica- ment. The signs of personal dignity and creativity that permeate Williams's collec- tion of stories testify to the capacity and culture of marginalized people. Such accomplishments are all the more admirable for existing in the face of being cut off, or orphaned, from beneficial resources that ought to be available. Williams's narrative map of Passaic reveals how such achievements help people cope with the losses symbolized by orphanhood. In what follows, several stories will be singled out as figuring the orphan (the first date of publication follows each title in parentheses): the title story (1934), "The Girl with the Pimply Face" (1934), "The Use of Force" (1933), "Jean Beicke" (1933), "A Face of Stone" (1935), "Under the Greenwood Tree" (1938), and "World's End" (1938).In the title story, which also opens the volume, Williams draws the reader into his fictive world by following the contours of the Passaic River and a variety of human activities in relation to it.1 The syntax of the opening sentence pays hom- age to the landscape by imitating the river's drift, but it also carefully establishes the urban setting of the collection by calling attention to the factory on the river as well as the children playing along the river's banks. The visual appeal of the first sentence has a cinematic intensity, zooming in on "a spot of a canoe filled by the small boy who no doubt made it" (FD 109). Williams also includes a soundtrack to his "midstream" portrait when he alludes to "a sound of work going on there" from the Manhattan Rubber Co. By carefully situating his reader in this richly elaborated world, Williams sets the stage for the participant-observer ethos of much of his collection and conjures a vivid reality.2 In Robert Gish's words, "the narrator [ . . . ] is so moved to empathy that he passes beyond voyeur to partici- pant through the telling and retelling of their lives" (66).At the same time, in the very next paragraph Williams reminds his readers of the mediated quality of his portrait by focusing on the children's cry of "Paper!" (FD 109). In doing so, Williams unites his commitment to a local, historicized realism with a self-reflexive form of representation common in modernist writing. He makes readers notice the variety of material modes or media (visual as well as linguistic) available for depicting Passaic. And he draws attention to his own man- ner of representation, the formal techniques for rendering that world. By uniting what Stephen Halliwell calls mimesis as referential imitation to mimesis as per- spectival world-making in the opening scenes of this first story in the collection, Williams invites his readers both to experience the world of Passaic, New Jersey, "first-hand" through an absorbingly realistic verisimilitude and to notice his artis- tic creation of that world through a modernist self-consciousness about form (5).3 In other words, a realist mimesis is generally content-based, while a modernist mimesis is more oriented toward the process of creation necessary for representa- tion. …
... forts may be regarded as politically and morally ambivalent. As Robert Schulman observes, &qu... more ... forts may be regarded as politically and morally ambivalent. As Robert Schulman observes, "in part Billy represents the will ing consent that defines hegemony."34 Aboard the Bellipotent there was "no merrier man in his mess" than Billy Budd; in ...
In his 1938 short-story collection Life Along the Passaic River, William Carlos Williams emphasiz... more In his 1938 short-story collection Life Along the Passaic River, William Carlos Williams emphasizes the discrepancy between realist verisimilitude and modernist self-reflexivity to dramatize the plight of the poor due to general economic conditions, particularly through the metaphor of the orphan. In addition, figurations of family, both positive and negative, offer an imaginative survey of possibilities and pitfalls for remedying the orphan’s predicament. The signs of personal dignity and creativity that permeate Williams’s collection of stories testify to the capacity and culture of marginalized people. Such accomplishments are all the more admirable for existing in the face of being cut off, or orphaned, from beneficial resources that ought to be available. Williams’s narrative map of Passaic reveals how such accomplishments help people cope with the losses symbolized by orphanhood.
"Forgetting/7 wrote the French historian Ernest Renan, "is a crucial factor in the crea... more "Forgetting/7 wrote the French historian Ernest Renan, "is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation." "Indeed," he continues, "historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality" (11). In the case of the United States, the conquest of Native Americans exemplifies the violence that according to Renan must always be forgotten in the formation of a nation. A number of Robert Frost's poems reflect the necessary forgetting that Renan describes, but many of them engage in acts of remembering that honor the past without subverting any particular ideology. As a poet, Frost is both settled and unsettling, a writer who composes without resorting to simplistic moral categories or the easy romanticization of Indians as noble savages. At the same time that his poems testify to their conflicting positions within the Joycean nightmare of history, Frost himself "distrusted progressive models . . . and was apt to see certain of his inheritances as natural and unchangeable" (Rotella, 242). In his thinking about national history and empire, Frost adopts a Virgilian perspective, assuming that tears are in the nature of things and that in the long-term perspective of human history, the European conquest of the Americas merely gave rise to the world's most recent empire, which in its turn, too, would someday fall. In particular, Frost's treatment of the theme of the American Indian shows that despite the willed forgetting entailed by national narratives, the memory of the brutality that founds the nation persists in the imagination of European Americans. Many of Frost's poems show the ways in which that memory can haunt otherwise confident expressions of patriotism, troubling complacent formulations of American history as a straightforward progress toward freedom and equality.
Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice, 2016
Listening to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First? ” can provide a helpful introduction to E.E. ... more Listening to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First? ” can provide a helpful introduction to E.E. Cummings’s special use of pronouns in “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” Like Cummings, Abbott and Costello convert pronouns, other parts of speech, or short phrases into proper nouns. After students wrestle with this context in relation to the poem, they will be ready to think about other contexts, such as the legacy of Emersonian individualism or the Romantic idea of the child’s closeness to God. Finally, the role of gender in the love story is also worth exploring, and the romance between anyone and noone can be considered in the context of the ballad tradition. Introduction Despite many linguistic attempts to account for the grammar of E.E. Cummings's "anyone lived in a pretty how town," the poem is widely anthologized, suggesting that it is well regarded and repays study, even if it may not be understood at first glance (see Cureton, Levin, Lord, Reinhart, Thorne). I...
Charles Altieri. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell Univer... more Charles Altieri. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 299 pp. $52.50 cloth; $22.50 paper. In this recent book, Charles Altieri pits cognitivist philosophy against an aesthetic approach to emotions in order to acknowledge the central role of the affects in human experience and to reveal the "knowledge" this experience can make available. The arts are his key example of how affects should be theorized and understood. He characterizes cognitivist philosophy as inadequate to the depth, temporality, and value of affects in human experience. Instead, he proposes a more phenomenological understanding of the affects, which for him include feelings, moods, emotions, and passions. All feelings are suffused with the agent's imagination, but feelings are most closely related to sensations. By contrast, mood is an atmosphere colored by a particular feeling, emotions entail narrative projections, and passions are feelings ...
Charles Altieri. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. I... more Charles Altieri. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2013. 279 pp. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Charles Altieri is assiduous and dutiful in his attention to Stevens's career and to his readings of specific poems, but it is his subtitle (Toward a Phenomenology of Value) that articulates the larger ambition of the book, which is to stake a claim for the independent value of the arts. Such a defense is especially important in the face of recent emphases on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). The book's overarching claim is that Stevens "offers one of our richest demonstrations of the pressures that Enlightenment attitudes impose on our ways of thinking, especially on our ways of formulating values that will not seem outdated or evasive of the powers of science" (7). STEM programs will no doubt continue to receive attention, accolades, and funds, but in this book Altieri m...
Henry James's What Maisie Knew is, in Paul Theroux's felicitous phrase, "a novel of ... more Henry James's What Maisie Knew is, in Paul Theroux's felicitous phrase, "a novel of thrusting hands" (7). Many critics have observed the importance of the novel's extensive hand imagery, yet no one has done a systematic study of that imagery. The hidden significance behind the repeated patterns of hand images in What Maisie Knew, however, justifies a particularly close analysis of those patterns. The shifting dynamic of power relations between Maisie and the other characters in What Maisie Knew may be charted and interpreted, for example, by focusing on a particular gesture that recurs throughout the book: the laying of one's own hand upon that of another person. The curious repetitions and variations of the verb-phrase "to lay one's hand upon" suggest that in the novel power and possession are communicated through touch. It is therefore significant that Sir Claude and Maisie more frequently act as the subjects of the verb-phrase in its variou...
Matthew Hart. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacula... more Matthew Hart. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing. Oxford UP, 2010.Matthew Hart's Nations of Nothing but Poetry contributes to the growing field of transnational criticism, joining such studies as Anita Patterson's Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Jahan Ramazani's Transnational Poetics (U of Chicago P, 2009). Although Hart derives his main concept of the synthetic vernacular from the poetics of Hugh MacDiarmid, he persuasively explains why the concept also applies to Basil Bunting, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Melvin Toison.Drawing on Edward Sapir's belief that "'provincial' language is a fundamental element of literary art," Hart zeroes in on the contradiction between the materiality of language, particularly in the form of dialects, and the universal appeal of successful literature (8). To explain what he means by "synthetic vernacular," he draws on Adorno's claim that "the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived." Hart equates Adorno's concept with "the idea of a language that articulates some collective sense of nationality," while he correlates the thing conceived with the "actual" poetic discourse of nationhood (8). From this perspective, the vernacular can only be synthetic because the sign is never wholly adequate to the concept. Focusing on this divide, Hart explores how different poets from both sides of the Atlantic forge distinctive idioms in relation to their specific dreams of nationhood. He relates his study to modernism's preoccupation with mimesis by examining the way his poets "strain the representational norms of vernacular language to the breaking point, thereby registering the contradictoriness - and uncanny durability - of the politics of locality in a transnational age" (16).Hart views MacDiarmid's "Synthetic Scots poetry as a creative solution to the problem of reconciling Scottish nationalism and socialist internationalism" (52). He argues that this solution is only partially effective because of Scotland's contradictory status as a partner in promoting the British Empire and as a victim of English linguistic domination. The characteristic gesture of a MacDiarmid poem is always double, as in the following example: "Noisy, inorganic, and dredged up from textbooks and dictionaries, the language of 'On a Raised Beach' . . . binds language to a place . . . and yet reveals it to be always out of place, forever rejoining and remaking the world" (67). To explain this dynamic, Hart contrasts MacDiarmid's method with Pound' s in Cathay: "Rather than comprising a systematic reflection on the contemporarneity of an ethnohistorical type, the 'nexus of personae' at work in MacDiarmid's Scots poems are part of a catch-as-catch-can program to 'represent an alternative Scot' in the present moment" (65). Hart sees this as laudable but also notices that it undercuts the political efficacy of MacDiarmid's thought. In the long run, for MacDiarmid, "poetry ... is the true test of politics, its forms and languages allowing for imaginative complexities far greater than those encompassed by mere theory." Unfortunately, however, "this aesthetic victory has little parallel at the level of activism or political theory" (77).In his chapter on Bunting, Hart tries to account for the paradox of what the poet "called 'a dialect written in the spelling of the capital' - a Northumbrian vernacular verse, that is, which looks like Standard English" (79). As with MacDiarmid, Hart detects a regional cosmopolitanism at workin Bunting's writing, a quality he connects to synthetic vernacularism. For Hart, the chief tension driving Bunting's poetry is the tension between the dialect of the spoken word and the potential durability of the written word. His poem Briggflatts "never engages with graphic forms of writing without also troubling their suitability for recording a life and defining a Northumbrian poetics" (88). …
"The finest short stories are those that raise, in short, one particular man or woman, from ... more "The finest short stories are those that raise, in short, one particular man or woman, from that Gehenna, the newspapers, where at last all men are equal, to the distinction of being an individual. To be responsive not to the ordinances of the herd (Russia-like) but to the extraordinary responsibility of being a person."-William Carlos Williams, "A Beginning on the Short Story (Notes)""He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing."-Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass"The world's an orphan's home."-Marianne Moore, "In Distrust of Merits"In his 1938 short-story collection Life Along the Passaic River, Wil- liams emphasizes the discrepancy between realist verisimilitude and modernist self-reflexivity to dramatize the plight of the poor due to general economic conditions, particularly through the metaphor of the orphan. In addition, figurations of family, both positive and negative, offer an imaginative survey of possibilities and pitfalls for remedying the orphan's predica- ment. The signs of personal dignity and creativity that permeate Williams's collec- tion of stories testify to the capacity and culture of marginalized people. Such accomplishments are all the more admirable for existing in the face of being cut off, or orphaned, from beneficial resources that ought to be available. Williams's narrative map of Passaic reveals how such achievements help people cope with the losses symbolized by orphanhood. In what follows, several stories will be singled out as figuring the orphan (the first date of publication follows each title in parentheses): the title story (1934), "The Girl with the Pimply Face" (1934), "The Use of Force" (1933), "Jean Beicke" (1933), "A Face of Stone" (1935), "Under the Greenwood Tree" (1938), and "World's End" (1938).In the title story, which also opens the volume, Williams draws the reader into his fictive world by following the contours of the Passaic River and a variety of human activities in relation to it.1 The syntax of the opening sentence pays hom- age to the landscape by imitating the river's drift, but it also carefully establishes the urban setting of the collection by calling attention to the factory on the river as well as the children playing along the river's banks. The visual appeal of the first sentence has a cinematic intensity, zooming in on "a spot of a canoe filled by the small boy who no doubt made it" (FD 109). Williams also includes a soundtrack to his "midstream" portrait when he alludes to "a sound of work going on there" from the Manhattan Rubber Co. By carefully situating his reader in this richly elaborated world, Williams sets the stage for the participant-observer ethos of much of his collection and conjures a vivid reality.2 In Robert Gish's words, "the narrator [ . . . ] is so moved to empathy that he passes beyond voyeur to partici- pant through the telling and retelling of their lives" (66).At the same time, in the very next paragraph Williams reminds his readers of the mediated quality of his portrait by focusing on the children's cry of "Paper!" (FD 109). In doing so, Williams unites his commitment to a local, historicized realism with a self-reflexive form of representation common in modernist writing. He makes readers notice the variety of material modes or media (visual as well as linguistic) available for depicting Passaic. And he draws attention to his own man- ner of representation, the formal techniques for rendering that world. By uniting what Stephen Halliwell calls mimesis as referential imitation to mimesis as per- spectival world-making in the opening scenes of this first story in the collection, Williams invites his readers both to experience the world of Passaic, New Jersey, "first-hand" through an absorbingly realistic verisimilitude and to notice his artis- tic creation of that world through a modernist self-consciousness about form (5).3 In other words, a realist mimesis is generally content-based, while a modernist mimesis is more oriented toward the process of creation necessary for representa- tion. …
... forts may be regarded as politically and morally ambivalent. As Robert Schulman observes, &qu... more ... forts may be regarded as politically and morally ambivalent. As Robert Schulman observes, "in part Billy represents the will ing consent that defines hegemony."34 Aboard the Bellipotent there was "no merrier man in his mess" than Billy Budd; in ...
In his 1938 short-story collection Life Along the Passaic River, William Carlos Williams emphasiz... more In his 1938 short-story collection Life Along the Passaic River, William Carlos Williams emphasizes the discrepancy between realist verisimilitude and modernist self-reflexivity to dramatize the plight of the poor due to general economic conditions, particularly through the metaphor of the orphan. In addition, figurations of family, both positive and negative, offer an imaginative survey of possibilities and pitfalls for remedying the orphan’s predicament. The signs of personal dignity and creativity that permeate Williams’s collection of stories testify to the capacity and culture of marginalized people. Such accomplishments are all the more admirable for existing in the face of being cut off, or orphaned, from beneficial resources that ought to be available. Williams’s narrative map of Passaic reveals how such accomplishments help people cope with the losses symbolized by orphanhood.
"Forgetting/7 wrote the French historian Ernest Renan, "is a crucial factor in the crea... more "Forgetting/7 wrote the French historian Ernest Renan, "is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation." "Indeed," he continues, "historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality" (11). In the case of the United States, the conquest of Native Americans exemplifies the violence that according to Renan must always be forgotten in the formation of a nation. A number of Robert Frost's poems reflect the necessary forgetting that Renan describes, but many of them engage in acts of remembering that honor the past without subverting any particular ideology. As a poet, Frost is both settled and unsettling, a writer who composes without resorting to simplistic moral categories or the easy romanticization of Indians as noble savages. At the same time that his poems testify to their conflicting positions within the Joycean nightmare of history, Frost himself "distrusted progressive models . . . and was apt to see certain of his inheritances as natural and unchangeable" (Rotella, 242). In his thinking about national history and empire, Frost adopts a Virgilian perspective, assuming that tears are in the nature of things and that in the long-term perspective of human history, the European conquest of the Americas merely gave rise to the world's most recent empire, which in its turn, too, would someday fall. In particular, Frost's treatment of the theme of the American Indian shows that despite the willed forgetting entailed by national narratives, the memory of the brutality that founds the nation persists in the imagination of European Americans. Many of Frost's poems show the ways in which that memory can haunt otherwise confident expressions of patriotism, troubling complacent formulations of American history as a straightforward progress toward freedom and equality.
Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice, 2016
Listening to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First? ” can provide a helpful introduction to E.E. ... more Listening to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First? ” can provide a helpful introduction to E.E. Cummings’s special use of pronouns in “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” Like Cummings, Abbott and Costello convert pronouns, other parts of speech, or short phrases into proper nouns. After students wrestle with this context in relation to the poem, they will be ready to think about other contexts, such as the legacy of Emersonian individualism or the Romantic idea of the child’s closeness to God. Finally, the role of gender in the love story is also worth exploring, and the romance between anyone and noone can be considered in the context of the ballad tradition. Introduction Despite many linguistic attempts to account for the grammar of E.E. Cummings's "anyone lived in a pretty how town," the poem is widely anthologized, suggesting that it is well regarded and repays study, even if it may not be understood at first glance (see Cureton, Levin, Lord, Reinhart, Thorne). I...
Charles Altieri. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell Univer... more Charles Altieri. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 299 pp. $52.50 cloth; $22.50 paper. In this recent book, Charles Altieri pits cognitivist philosophy against an aesthetic approach to emotions in order to acknowledge the central role of the affects in human experience and to reveal the "knowledge" this experience can make available. The arts are his key example of how affects should be theorized and understood. He characterizes cognitivist philosophy as inadequate to the depth, temporality, and value of affects in human experience. Instead, he proposes a more phenomenological understanding of the affects, which for him include feelings, moods, emotions, and passions. All feelings are suffused with the agent's imagination, but feelings are most closely related to sensations. By contrast, mood is an atmosphere colored by a particular feeling, emotions entail narrative projections, and passions are feelings ...
Charles Altieri. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. I... more Charles Altieri. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2013. 279 pp. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Charles Altieri is assiduous and dutiful in his attention to Stevens's career and to his readings of specific poems, but it is his subtitle (Toward a Phenomenology of Value) that articulates the larger ambition of the book, which is to stake a claim for the independent value of the arts. Such a defense is especially important in the face of recent emphases on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). The book's overarching claim is that Stevens "offers one of our richest demonstrations of the pressures that Enlightenment attitudes impose on our ways of thinking, especially on our ways of formulating values that will not seem outdated or evasive of the powers of science" (7). STEM programs will no doubt continue to receive attention, accolades, and funds, but in this book Altieri m...
Henry James's What Maisie Knew is, in Paul Theroux's felicitous phrase, "a novel of ... more Henry James's What Maisie Knew is, in Paul Theroux's felicitous phrase, "a novel of thrusting hands" (7). Many critics have observed the importance of the novel's extensive hand imagery, yet no one has done a systematic study of that imagery. The hidden significance behind the repeated patterns of hand images in What Maisie Knew, however, justifies a particularly close analysis of those patterns. The shifting dynamic of power relations between Maisie and the other characters in What Maisie Knew may be charted and interpreted, for example, by focusing on a particular gesture that recurs throughout the book: the laying of one's own hand upon that of another person. The curious repetitions and variations of the verb-phrase "to lay one's hand upon" suggest that in the novel power and possession are communicated through touch. It is therefore significant that Sir Claude and Maisie more frequently act as the subjects of the verb-phrase in its variou...
Explorers, colonists, native peoples—all played a role in early American settlement, and the lega... more Explorers, colonists, native peoples—all played a role in early American settlement, and the legacy they left was a turbulent one. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, as the United States asserted itself as a world power, poets began to revisit this legacy and to create their own interpretations of national history. In The Colonial Moment, Jeffrey Westover shows how five major poets—Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes—drew from national conflicts to assess America's new role as world leader.
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