Frank O'Hara in New York Race relations,poetic situations,postcolonial space

Abstract

Frank O'Hara's 1958 poem 'Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets' cites 'race' as 'the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles', a phrase that points to both domestic and international contexts for reading this New York poet. At the same time, 'race' has a history of specific valences in O'Hara's work – as a focus of exoticized images of desire, aesthetic fulfillment, and social energy. Further, race, inflected through various colonial screens, becomes the central avenue leading toward O'Hara's project of rewriting the parameters of social space in poetry, a radical aestheticization not just of landscape but of social relations, with a consequent socialization of the act of writing. This article explores O'Hara's spatial poetics through the terms of Situationist theory, in which the techniques of dérive and détournement are applied to a reading of the poet's active suspension of the 'rules' of a gridded and hierarchical social order.     

“And Let the Grove,If Not the Parlour,Stand”: Home,Memory, and Gender in Mary Leapor's “Crumble-Hall”

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Mary Leapor's “Crumble-Hall” and attempts to shed light on her gendered/class poetics. It argues that the poet uses the house as a metaphor for gendered (male) and social class (gentry) dominance as well as that through memory she assumes (poetic) control over it, demolishes and remakes it, thus forging her female/literary identity. The article also demonstrates that Leapor makes use of both social and psychological space in her poem. By appropriating the country-house convention, she creates a dialectical relationship between external space—the architectural structure; and internal space—the kitchen maid's unconscious; and points out that as the former crumbles, the latter stands because of the significance it acquires. Indeed, her memory of Crumble-Hall not only spawns years of suppression and hardship but also becomes the stepping-stone for her rebellion as well as for the creation of her verse. Her poetic empowerment is projected through the image of the grove surrounding the country house, a multifaceted symbol signifying the interrelation of home, memory, and female literary production. Overall, Leapor re-creates the past glory of the gentry house, depicts her subservient state, conveys her subversion, and finally, establishes her newfound identity as a female poet, all within the framework of fragmented memories. Consequently, she succeeds in promoting the need for gendered and class transgression, in the hope that her sisters can bring about the “crumbling” of their own “house” and remake their “home.”     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

Sui Sin Far's American Words

Abstract

This essay offers readings of three stories from Sui Sin Far's 1912 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance: the title story, 'The Americanizing of Pau Tsu', and '"Its Wavering Image."' Each of these stories treats an episode of romance in a multiracial society as, simultaneously, a problem of reading and of writing in a contested culture. Each turns on a quoted passage from a poem, by Tennyson, Ban Jieyu, and Longfellow, respectively. (For the latter two stories, the sources have not previously been identified in published criticism.) Analysis of Sui Sin Far's subtle and transformative engagements with literary works from several national traditions both reveals new complexities in her fiction and has the potential to revise current views of literary history.     

The Foreign in Mandel'shtam's Poetry at the Beginning of the 1930s. A Look Through the Prism of Translation

Abstract

Mandel'shtam's poetry reflects a feeling of alienation from his surroundings both as a poet, whose calling endows him with unique perceptiveness, and as a person crushed by the Soviet regime. This alienation is concretized in different ways: familiar places and scenes are estranged and distanced, foreign names and places are mingled with native loci, and direct references are made to an encounter with foreign elements.

This paper offers readings of two poems through their versions in translation. Since translation attempts to familiarize the foreign, much can be gathered from these versions about the nature of the foreign, or alien, elements in each poem. The first of them, 'He …' ('Don't tempt foreign languages …'), presents ambivalent emotions aroused by foreign speech. In the second poem '' ('I'm still far from patriarch …'), the speaker strolls through Moscow, where he feels a stranger and a native inhabitant at once. The translations indicate to what extent each text is felt to be foreign through the degree by which they mitigate and familiarize it. They also shed light on the poems in specific places. Finally, the popularity of a given poem in translation often indicates its universal appeal. Thus, the present study suggests the comparative examination of translations as a method of reading and interpreting poetry.     

'The world will be saved by beauty': The Revival of Romantic Theories of the Symbol in Pavel Florenskii's Works

Abstract

From a study of Pavel Florenskii's (1882–1937) works on the symbol from the 1920s, it is suggested that Florenskii's understanding of symbolism bears witness to the revival of romantic theories at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The continuity between romantic theories of the symbol and Florenskii's understanding of the symbolic image has not previously been noted. However, the closeness of Florenskii's writings and Viacheslav Ivanov's on the symbol has been noticed, while Ivanov's indebtedness to the German romantics has long been known. Thus, another relatively little studied dimension of Florenskii's work is uncovered and, in particular, his involvement with Russian Symbolism and with its main theoretical spokesman. Florenskii's understanding of the symbol is seen in the context of developments growing out of the October Revolution, but also, more broadly, as a response to the crisis of modernity. The romantic definition of the symbol, as accepted by Florenskii, is an attempt to restore the lost sense of belonging to 'higher' reality through the ontological identity between 'being' and 'thing'. The mission of art in this project is of fundamental importance and it can be summed up in the famous words of Dostoevskii's character, Prince Myshkin, in The Idiot: 'beauty will save the world'.     

The Bengal Connection: Transnationalising America in The Namesake and The Tree Bride

Abstract

A reading is presented of The Namesake and The Tree Bride as diasporic novels that transnationalise the host culture by inscribing the ethnicity and history of Bengal on to the cultural topography of America. This interpolation is contextualised both in terms of the 'Bengal connection' — the now occluded saga of Bengal's rich commercial and intellectual contacts with New England from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries — and the changing paradigms of immigrant socialisation from the melting pot to multiculturalism and beyond. The inference drawn is that the non-Eurocentric and non-Atlantic 'Bengal connection', which may be taken as emblematic of other such strands in American society, not only troubles monologic myths of 'Americanness', but simultaneously interrogates the sufficiency of the 'Atlantic' template as the marker of a multi-ethnic nation. A suggested alternative is Tagore's 'vernacular nationalism' that admits intrinsic otherness as integral to its conception of national identity.     

Locating an American romanticism: Emerson,Cavell, 'Experience'

Abstract

This article reads Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1844 essay 'Experience' as a work of mourning that gives rise to critical reaction in the romantic tradition to specific philosophical ideas New England had imported from Europe early in the 19th century. The author reads this transatlantic interaction in the wider context of journal entries, arguing that the death of Emerson's son is a test to Emerson's philosophy and his literary form, indeed, the highest challenge, against which the claims of philosophy and literature could only fail. Moreover, it is the failure of his philosophy to contain his son's death, to express it, that makes Emerson's essay romantic. Defining romanticism as incompletion: the impossibility of a total system which would include, for example, the death of the other (Cavell, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Blanchot). This, the author argues, proposes a 'location' for American romanticism that constitutes an adequate response to Critchley's contention, in his reading of Cavell, that Emerson is not, in fact, romantic.     

'Totalitarianism', Treason and Containment in Catch-22 (and 1984)

Abstract

Critical writing on Catch-22 has often centred (quite naturally and understandably, it must be said) on concepts such as paradox, black humour and the absurdity of the human condition. Although these approaches have certainly not been without profit and have produced interesting readings, they have also tended to obscure, under the generic nature of such frameworks, the novel's patent political concerns — concerns which, moreover, are not at all unrelated to the usual critical preoccupations. In a similar way, although Catch-22 criticism has often relied heavily on the detection of literary allusions and influences at work in the text, a most obvious source of influence seems to have been generally ignored. This essay attempts to offer a different reading of Catch-22 based on the assertion that what the novel is really about is 'totalitarianism'. Its starting point is, therefore, a parallel reading bringing together Heller's best-known book with one of the central literary texts on 'totalitarianism' — George Orwell's 1984. Focusing initially on the similar way(s) in which the two novels construct what is called a 'totalitarian' atmosphere, the essay proceeds to briefly demonstrate the bearing of the 'totalitarian' problematic on another important '60s novel, E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, and to offer a fuller reading of Catch-22, including a summary excursion into the difficult question of how the student of '60s American fictions should approach the concept of 'totalitarianism'.     

Polish Foreign Trade: A Retrospective View

The unspecified visual art referent in Akhmatova’s enigmatic poem, “An Old Portrait” (Staryi portret, 1910), dedicated to the painter Aleksandra Ekster, has long inspired critical speculation. scholars (superfin and Timenchik, Rosslyn, Rubins) have proposed numerous readings, but none has entirely resolved the poem’s mysteries. I will argue that the ballets Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cléopâtre, performed in the first Paris season of the Ballets Russes, provide hitherto unexplored subtexts for the spare but dramatic poem. Considered within the context of the ballets, the poem’s characters and details take on more specific and meaningful contours. By analyzing these ballets’ respective libretti, costume designs and stage sets, it becomes possible to detect in the poem references to the Gobelins portrait depicting the deadly enchantress in Le Pavillon d’Armide, the poisoning of Amoun at the conclusion of Cléopâtre, and Vaclav Nijinsky’s performances as Armida’s servant in Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cleopatra’s slave in Cléopâtre. The poem also demonstrates Akhmatova’s early fascination with portraiture, especially the complex relationship between artist and sitter. In this sense, “An Old Portrait” anticipates the poet’s eventual cultivation of her own image in portraits painted by her contemporaries.     

Mental illness as metaphor in Hua-ling Nieh and Li-hua Yu's Chinese-language American novels

Abstract

This article focuses on two fictional immigrant characters who appear in the Chinese-language American novels Sang Ching Yu Tau Hong (Mulberry and Peach) by Hua-ling Nieh and You Jian Zong Lu, You Jian Zong Lu (Palm Trees Again, Palm Trees Again) by Li-hua Yu respectively. Both protagonists suffer from identity crises that lead to mental disorders. These disorders, resulting partly from their immigrant experience, should be read as a metaphor for the damage that can be caused by discrimination and cultural dislocation, not as a statement that immigrants are somehow inherently unbalanced. A character's slip into mental illness may occur because of the character's mistreatment and subsequent inability to adjust, but the character's mental illness may also be seen as an active resistance to assimilation and as a reaffirmation of the character's 'Chineseness'.     

A walk on the wild side: Urban ethnography meets the Flâneur

Abstract

This paper focuses on the concept of the flâneur, deriving largely from the works of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, and attempts to reveal its contemporary relevance for sociological practice. The flâneur is treated as an instructive metaphor for the sociologist's relationship with modernity and urban life, and therefore as providing insight into the social, historical and theoretical contexts for the analysis of the world today. More than this, the idea of the flâneur is treated as highly instructive of research strategies confronting urban life, namely ethnography. The paper seeks to expose a critical space between ‘realist’ and ‘textual’ ethnographies and provide a locus for the discussion of associated methodological problems. A burgeoning literature and tradition of work in this area is examined which will also be of interest to the sociological theorist.     

'The look of hope or the look of sadness': Robert Frank's dialogical vision

Abstract

This article examines the work of Robert Frank with reference to his seminal photographic work, The Americans, and its relationships to his later post-1970s images. It argues that the 'outside eye' he brought to the US post-war consensus offered him a new comparative critical position and represented a fundamental, counter-cultural shift in the tradition of documentary photography. This vision formed around Frank's multiple 'dialogues', with the US social landscape, with earlier traditions of documentary and 'street' photography in Europe and the USA, and with the Beat generation's radical challenges to dominant post-war values. This 'moment' of overlapping and interconnected relations forms the basis for this discussion of Frank's importance as a 'political' commentator whose work has influenced generations of photographers and shares much with those writers who emerged as the Beats.     

Time and mobility in the writing of Charles W. Chesnutt

Abstract

This article considers the elusiveness and ambivalence that characterize Chesnutt's writing in terms of the author's imaginative efforts to probe beyond the historical circumstances that condition and frame his authorship. Noting the focus on figures of absence and illegibility in recent criticism of Chesnutt, I examine the notion of a self in the process of uprooting itself that appears to preoccupy much of his fiction. In a close reading of Chesnutt's journals and his essay on 'Superstitions and Folklore of the South', I elaborate Chesnutt's conception of a literary voice as emerging from a context of commodification and contestation and oriented on a moment of posterior reception. I then discuss how this concept of a detachable voice informs Chesnutt's exploration of a transplantable self and an understanding of freedom in terms of a re-imagined social bond. This discussion focuses on the ways Chesnutt, in some of his short stories and in The House Behind the Cedars, evokes a passage from a condition of bondage to a capacity for multiple and variable attachments.     

How to Sharpen Words: Mayakovsky’s Machines of Poetic Humour

Analysis of Mayakovsky’s prose writings of the mid-1920s on the craft of satire reveals that he understood it to be a scientific discipline subject to strict cause-and-effect relationships: if the satirical treatment of a theme — any theme — is correct, then the piece will produce ‘involuntary laughter’ (neproizvol’nyi smekh). As an example, he puts forward his 1923 poem ‘Schematic of Laughter’ (Skhema smekha) — a text he claims contains no comic ideas, but only the correct satirical sharpening of discourse. As a barebones inventory of comic devices, the poem is a perfect place to begin an examination of Mayakovsky’s poetics of humour. But it is not alone; in a note to the 1925 poem ‘Shallow Philosophy in Deep Places’ (Melkaia filosofiia na glubokikh mestakh), Mayakovsky explains that it too is a ‘skeleton poem’ (stikh-skelet), just like the ‘Schematic’, and another compendium of humorous devices. Together, then, these poems represent the purest and most concentrated expression of Mayakovsky’s understanding of the mechanics of poetic humour. Sustained close reading of both poems reveals that his humorous devices, ranging from formal to narrative, all serve to establish and then deceive expectations in the reader.     

Legible lesbian lines: The bilingual poetry of Irena Klepfisz

Abstract

This article focuses on the poetry of Jewish lesbian poet Irena Klepfisz, written in New York starting in the 1970s. While drawing on the tradition of Yiddish women’s poetry from the first half of the twentieth century, both as scholar and poet, Klepfisz also creates a brand new, bilingual, Yiddish-English poetic mode. By mobilizing both Yiddish and English to voice her poetic and political concerns, Klepfisz stages the English/Yiddish encounter as a site where dominant norms in both languages can be challenged and new possibilities emerge. Exploring both her turn to the past and her bilingual poetry, this article reveals how Klepfisz puts her politics and scholarship to poetic practice and suggests that Klepfisz offers a model of queer translation that undoes the borders between past and present, English and Yiddish, creating a unique mode of Jewish lesbian reclamation and invention.     

Writing of home and home of writing Chinese American diaspora and literary imagination

Abstract

The Silent Traveller's Hong Kong Zhuzhi Poems (1972) by Chiang Yee provides an interesting case for study in relation to Asian American literary theory aesthetics for at least the following three reasons: First, Chiang's poems comment on the 'idiosyncratic phenomena' in Hong Kong, and the ambiguity and sometimes contradictions in his comments allow us to explore the issues of assimilation and Americanization and to get a good understanding of the meaning of 'home' to a Chinese diasporic poet. Second, utilization of the zhuzhi form, a tradition that has been largely abandoned in modern China, suggests the intrinsic value of the cultural tradition and emotional or psychological satisfaction to a Chinese diaspora. Chiang's tenacious adherence to the cultural tradition is a reflection of his yearning for an imaginary 'home'. Third, the use of the Chinese language underlines the poet's Chinese cultural sensitivity. A discussion of the form, content, and language of these poems illustrates the complexity of Asian American cultural and ethnic identity and the significance of the imaginary 'home' – a construction through writing where a diaspora may find a haven in displacement.