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This book defines the theory and practice of “classicism” as practiced in the 1920s by a number of composers, writers, and artists, setting it off against other movements of the period that are customarily grouped together under the general heading of “modernism.” It argues that classicism is a more precise term than neo-classicism during this period, since every classicism from antiquity to the present shares certain common qualities as well as characteristics of its own time. The book develops terms of comparison applicable to all three aesthetic forms, exploring the theory of classicism as developed by thinkers in France, Italy, Germany, and England as a reaction, first, against the formlessness of late romanticism, and then, against the chaos of World War I. It goes on to study the manner in which that theory was practiced in the work of three exemplary figures--Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot. The model of their work is then used to determine in various test cases whether those artists can properly be called classicists. The book concludes that classicists of the ’20s aspire consciously and systematically, through the use of forms and techniques echoing the past, such as linearity and simplification, to express the qualities of reason, restraint, clarity, and order as an antidote to the disruptions of the modern world.

North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. This book studies patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. This book considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. It investigates how our understanding of key themes, genres, and periods within U.S. cultural study is deepened, and in some cases transformed, when Canada and Mexico enter the picture. How, for example, does the work of the iconic American writer Jack Kerouac read differently when his Franco-American origins and Mexican travels are taken into account? Or how would our conception of American modernism be altered if Mexico were positioned as a center of artistic and political activity?

This book argues that Wallace Stevens’s poetry develops increasingly sophisticated conjugations of the relationship between poetics and ecology, culminating in his late great long poem, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” To understand how and why this is the case, however, we must rethink what “ecology” and “ecocriticism” mean. This book thus takes on two primary tasks: a fundamental retheorization of “ecopoetics"; and a fundamental rereading of the cumulative trajectory of one of Modernism’s most philosophically engaged figures. As regards the first task, this book uses systems theory, theoretical biology, and deconstruction to bring the critical concepts of “ecology” and “ecopoetics” up to date with contemporary work in theoretical biology. As regards the second, it offers a fundamental redescription of Stevens’s place in literary history, in particular his storied role as the main inheritor of the Romanticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. For both lines of investigation, the inescapability and productivity of paradox is central—and a problem, Stevens shows, that poetry can handle better than philosophy. For Stevens and for theoretical biology, mind and world, organism and environment, do not describe an ontological divide; instead, they are co-implicated in a dynamic holism that is paradoxical (and deconstructed) because that relationship is different for each living thing in its “embodied enaction.” This realization necessitates a fundamentally non-representationalist understanding of ecopoetics, and it also makes it clear why the epistemological problems famously associated with Stevens’s poetry can only be solved by a shift from epistemology to ecology.

This book offers a look at the St. Lucian, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Derek Walcott, and grounds his work firmly in the context of West Indian history. The book argues that Walcott's poems and plays are bound up with an effort to re-imagine West Indian society since its emergence from colonial rule, its ill-fated attempt at political unity, and its subsequent dispersal into tiny nation-states. According to this book, Walcott's work is centrally concerned with the West Indies' imputed absence from history and lack of cohesive national identity or cultural tradition. Walcott sees this lack not as impoverishment but as an open space for creation. In his poems and plays, West Indian history becomes a realm of necessity, something to be confronted, contested, and remade through literature. What is most vexed and inspired in Walcott's work can be traced to this quixotic struggle.

Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use this book's tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, the book argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary—thriving outside the institutions we take as central to the literary world. The book explores this phenomenon in the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature’s diminished role in the public sphere, this book suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy.

This book argues that after WWII American poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of matter and mind. Physics led the way. This encouraged other disciplines, especially social sciences, to borrow physics concepts to form their own scientific conceptual schemes. Around mid-century, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Olson developed similarly would-be scientific models for a poetics of inquiry. The book compares their efforts, and places them in a wider context of a history of interrelations between modern American poetry and science since the modernist period. It is argued that literary theory has often lacked resources to study such epistemological competition. Physicists such as Oppenheimer and Schröger were interested in poetry, especially as an example of the difficulties of communicating quantum strangeness. During the 1950s, Rukeyser and Olson gradually abandoned the attempt to construct their own conceptual schemes using spare parts from physics. Olson adopted Whitehead’s philosophy; Rukeyser turned to narrative. By contrast, Robert Duncan embraced conceptual pluralism and continued to engage with science. Other poets found different ways to use and critique the methods of science. Later chapters give close readings of poems by Rae Armantrout, Jackson Mac Low, George Oppen and Amiri Baraka that engage with specific articles in the Scientific American. Its role in American society is explored. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the impact on poetry of the shift from physics to molecular biology as the paradigm of scientific method.

What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power do we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? This collection of essays forms a kind of evolutionary history of the past century of American poetry. Through close readings of the great Modernists, midcentury objectivists, late twentieth-century poets, contemporary poets, and more, the book unearths an American poetic landscape that is subtler and more varied than most critics have allowed. It uncovers commonalities among poets considered opposites, dramatizes how form and history are mutually entailing, and explores how the conventions of poetry, its inheritance, and its inventions sprang from the tensions of ordinary life. At its core, the book is about poetic making, one that reveals how the best poets not only receive but understand and adapt what comes before them, reinterpreting the history of their art to create work that is, indeed, radical as reality.

Winner of the 2004 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, this book offers a new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerge in this study as vital responses to spectacle lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. With interpretations of both classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of W. C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B. B. King to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, the book will transform the understanding of the blues and its enduring power.

For most readers, the literature of World War II is a literature of trauma: think Catch–22 or “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” For many, war is itself synonymous with trauma, typically understood through the myth of the trauma hero, a figure who confronts death and brings back deep truths about existence. But from the 1940s through the 60s, writers concerned with World War II explored a range of approaches attempting to make sense of industrialized warfare, collective sacrifice, race, and America’s military-commercial empire. This book uncovers the lost history of American World War II literature obscured behind the myth of the trauma hero and explores the range of efforts made by authors attempting to understand some of the very problems that plague us today: the limits of empire, the contradictions of capitalism and nationalism, political identity, and the struggle between democracy and militarism. Considering often overlooked work by major American novelists and poets alongside cartoons, films, and journalism, the book investigates the role of the hero in totalized industrial wartime, and shows how trauma took hold in the American political imagination as an ideological solution to the problems of political violence. In so doing, it substantially revises the way we read World War II literature, American war literature, and postwar American culture.