Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013 sheds new light on the hitherto neglected engagements of African American writers and thinkers with various literary, cultural, and artistic traditions of Asia. Starting with a reevaluation of Lewis G. Alexander’s transcultural remaking of haiku in 1923, this dissertation interrogates and revises the familiar interracial (read as “black-white”) terms of the African American struggle for freedom and equality. While critics have long taken for granted these terms as the sine qua non of the African American literary imagination and practice, this dissertation demonstrates how authors like Alexander defied not only the implicit dichotomy of black-and-white but also the critical bias that represents African American literature as a nationally segregated tradition distinctly cut off from cultural sources beyond the border of the United States and made legible only within its narrowly racialized and racializing contexts. More specifically, Black Notes on Asia argues that the ruling conceptions of the iv so-called “Harlem Renaissance in black and white” and the reductive understanding of the Black Arts Movement as an uncomplicated, propagandistic expression of black nationalism, fail to pay due attention to their underlying multiracial, multicultural, or transnational aesthetics and perspectives. In order to understand the full complexity and heterogeneity of the African American imagination from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, it is necessary to account for cultural ebbs and flows, echoes and reverberations, beyond the United States, Europe, and Africa, to include Asia. Rediscovering the hitherto overlooked traces and reflections of Asia within the African American imagination, this dissertation argues that Asia has provided numerous African American authors and intellectuals, canonized as well as forgotten, with additional or alternative cultural resources that liberated them from, or at least helped them destabilize, what they considered as the constraining racial and nationalist discourse of the United States.

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Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013

Les œuvres de John Dos Passos [1896-1970] sont souvent etudiees a l’aune – ou a l’ombre – de son parcours politique. L’enjeu de cette these est de revenir sur ce lien entre fiction et politique, en partant non plus des positions politiques de l’auteur mais des œuvres elles-memes, pour analyser si et en quoi la fiction peut se faire politique. Des romans de jeunesse aux œuvres de la maturite [notamment Manhattan Transfer et la trilogie U.S.A.], Dos Passos construit sa critique politique, fondee sur la remise en cause du recit lineaire. Il remplace la « destinee manifeste » de l’Amerique par le portrait des « deux nations » qui la composent, et travaille le genre du roman pour le defaire de sa dimension providentielle. En mettant a l’epreuve l’intrigue, le protagoniste et la temporalite, il inscrit cette critique politique au cœur meme de l’ecriture, et invite a porter un nouveau regard sur les œuvres politiques de l’entre-deux-guerres, et sur les liens entre modernisme et radicalisme, denoues par la critique de la Guerre Froide. Ses œuvres mettent en scene la difficulte de construire une litterature protestataire dans un pays fonde sur des ideaux democratiques. Plutot qu’un perpetuel retour au mythe des origines, cependant, elles mettent en place un veritable dialogue avec les textes fondateurs, dialogue au sein duquel la fiction fait peu a peu emerger, entre les lignes, le non-dit du politique

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Une écriture de combat : Fiction et politique dans l'entre-deux-guerres aux États-Unis : John Dos Passos (1920-1938)

Lyric poetry has the reputation of being solitary, hermetic, and focused exclusively on the experiences of the poet or first-person speaker. This reputation can make lyric poems seem selfinvolved and even solipsistic – uninterested in pressing social, historical, and ethical concerns. I contest this notion, and argue for lyric poetry’s social relevance, by drawing attention to the many poems written about other people. I argue that inherited New Critical ideas have guided the common false assumption that lyric poems must be solitary, and I make the case for an alternative non-New Critical kind of ‘lyric reading’ in which we pay more attention and attribute more significance to the myriad people and characters who appear in poems. I also provide a few general theoretical categories for thinking about others in lyric. In particular, I distinguish between ‘closed’ characters who don’t seem to resemble real people or to refer to real situations beyond the poems in which they appear, and ‘open’ characters who aren’t props or masks for the poet, but seem full of independent vitality, and to refer us to realistic, external lives outside the text. Finally, I argue that a generation of American poets in the 1950s and 60s broke from New Critical well-wrought solitude and autonomy by writing poems full of open characters. My dissertation examines four such poets – Thom Gunn, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O’Hara. I explore these poets’ works in depth, taking them as rich case studies in lyric representations of others and in the complex roles others can play in lyric poems.

“My Life Is Only One Life”: Turning to Other People in American Lyric Poetry After New Criticism

Fifteen years ago, one might easily have known about the work of William Carlos Williams without being aware that his mother was Puerto Rican or that he grew up in a bicultural, multilingual household (his father, though English, was raised in the Dominican Republic). While some critics continue to ignore Williams’s bicultural background—and thus maintain his image as the “non-ethnic” canonical figure to which we have been accustomed—certain trends in identity-based scholarship and pedagogy have allowed those who teach and write about Williams to feel comfortable enough now to emphasize the poet’s multicultural, diverse background. In fact, other critics have gone as far as insisting that Williams’s Latin American ethnicity actually influenced his verse in ways previously ignored, which should determine how we now categorize his poetry. That is, it has become a question for some whether we call Williams and his work “American,” “Spanish American,” or “Boricua” (a synonym for Puerto Rican, from boriken, the island’s original name). It is certainly not the case that Williams hid his ethnicity; he is the one, after all, who insisted on keeping his middle name in print. Considering the autobiographical and biographical works in which he acknowledges his own bicultural, multi-ethnic background, his repeated use of Spanish terms in his poetry, his critical praise for Spanish-speaking poets—not to mention his translations of Spanish and Latin American writers into English—one must admit that he made little effort to distance himself from his Latin American background. But the insistence among some critics that he inflected or actively wielded his ethnic background in his poetry as a way of undermining what he considered a hegemonic American majority culture misconstrues and then confuses both Williams’s sense of himself and his poetic vision. There is no evidence, from him or others, that Williams would have considered either American immigrants (including former Latin Americans) or their children as anything but American in identity. Furthermore, nothing in his writing indicates he viewed himself or his mother as a minority—as the term is used today, that is, to describe someone institutionally hindered from receiving all the benefits of first-class citizenship enjoyed by the majority. So the overarching question I address concerns the particular ways in which Williams identified himself with Spanish and Latin American culture, especially as these affected his poetry. I argue, first, that Williams, in his creation of what he called “the American idiom” (qtd. in Cohen 28), consciously attended to and utilized the language(s) and culture(s) of his local environment—beginning with those of his own childhood home, and then extending to those of the immigrants he lived among all his life—and that his aesthetic ideal of using the American English from “the mouths of Polish mothers” (Autobiography 311) assisted and ......................................................................................................

Cultural Identity, Translation, and William Carlos Williams

A Concept Analysis : Empowerment in Cancer Patients

The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939.

The Chicago Renaissance in American letters : a critical history

William Carlos Williams was an inventive writer never confined by any static genre or aesthetic postulate. In this authoritative study, Bernard Duffey recognizes that literary dynamism as he approaches the full breadth of Williams s work including his poetry, prose, fiction, and drama as an interrelated and interdependent web of writing. The result, the first truly comprehensive examination of a major American author and his kinetic art, will interest students and scholars of Williams, American literature, and modern poetry and criticism. Central to Duffey s study is a critical framework based on Kenneth Burke s "A Grammar of Motives" and the perception of the poet as an agent working in relation to a scene and its content in this case, the geographical and cultural locale that Williams clung to. Williams s work, Duffey argues, was informed by the dramatic sense of himself as a literary actor seeking embodiment of a dynamic, altering whole and his present condition of being. Ultimately, he stresses, the writer was more engaged in expressing literary action than in forging literary objects. Duffey amplifies this critical view through a close reading of specific works. Examining Williams s principal writings in the lights that seem most immediate to them, he tackles a variety of themes: the pervasiveness of scene in "In the American Grain" and the fiction; the role of agent or poetic person in "Kora in Hell, A Voyage to Pagany, Paterson," and "Pictures from Brueghel;" the function of poetic agency in the short poems, and of poetic action in Williams s drama."

Bernard Duffey

Papers

The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939.

The Chicago Renaissance in American letters : a critical history

A poetry of presence : the writing of William Carlos Williams

Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeth's.

Hamlin Garland's "Decline" from Realism