Showing papers in "American Literature in 1989"

Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville.

Abstract: INTRODUCTION PART I GOD'S BOW, MAN'S ARROWS: RELIGION, REFORM, AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 1. The New Religious Style 2. The Reform Impulse and the Paradox of Immoral Didacticism 3. The Transcendentalists, Whitman, and Popular Reform 4. Hawthorne and the Reform Impulse 5. Melville's Whited Sepulchres PART II: PUBLIC POISON: SENSATIONALISM AND SEXUALITY 6. The Sensational Press and the Rise of Subversive Literature 7. The Erotic Imagination 8. Poe and Popular Irrationalism 9. Hawthorne's Cultural Demons 10. Melville's Ruthless Democracy 11. Whitman's Transfigured Sensationalism PART III: OTHER AMAZONS: WOMEN'S RIGHTS, WOMEN'S WRONGS, AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION 12. Types of American Womanhood 13. Hawthorne's Heroines 14. The American Women's Renaissance and Emily Dickinson PART IV THE GROTESQUE POSTURE POPULAR HUMOR AND THE AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE STYLE 15. The Carnivalization of American Language 16. Transcendental Wild Oats 17. Whitman's Poetic Humor 18. Stylized Laugher in Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville EPILOGUE RECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM: LITERARY THEORY AND LITERARY HISTORY NOTES INDEX

The Posture of a Bohemian in the Poetry of Stephen Crane

Abstract: THOUGH Stephen Crane's two books of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (I895) and War Is Kind (I899), were published only four years apart, I believe important differences exist in their portrayal of Crane's religious philosophy. John Berryman and James Colvert would disagree; both believe that Crane's conception of the Christian God in these poems was divided between an affirmation of faith and a total denial of Christianity; as Berryman puts it, "neither won"-Crane never made a definitive choice, allowing instead both faith and atheism as equally possible hypotheses in all of his poetry.' Daniel Hoffman, on the other hand, suggests that a thematic shift did occur in the poetry in the course of Crane's career: "The assertion that 'Neither won' seems to me unsubstantiated by the verse itself.... In fact there is in Crane's treatment of God and of religion a progress from the utter denial of 'Well, then I hate thee' to an affirmation of faith in the 'interior pitying God.' But between the denial and 'When a people reach the top of a hill' ... are many poems and several stages."2 I agree with Hoffman that Crane's stance so far as God and Christianity are concerned does change, though it seems a little forced to assert specific stages in this progressively growing affirmation. Hoffman never really demonstrates a true progression, only that in a few of the later poems (and only "Blue Battal-

The American T.S. Eliot : a study of the early writings

Abstract: Preface 1. The souls of the devout 2. Divisions and precisions: ambivalence and ambiguity 3. A gesture and a pose: homo duplex 4. Where are the eagles and the trumpets? American aesthetes 5. The silhouette of Sweeney: cultures and conflict 6. Being between two lives: reading The Waste Land Afterword Notes Index.

Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping

Abstract: N trying to reinvent the American myth to fit female consciousness, the woman writer faces a double task: her work must respond to both the mainstream of native patriarchal literature and to the swelling current of writing-British and American-by and about women.1 This dual artistic legacy creates double richness and a double bind for the contemporary woman writer that few have negotiated with the confidence of Marilynne Robinson in her I980 novel Housekeeping. Just two decades before, Leslie Fiedler had warned that our classic literature is "a literature of horror for boys."2 In forging a bildungsroman about a female protagonist, Robinson brings a new perspective to bear on the dominant American myth about the developing individual freed from social constraints. Her female adventurer emphasizes the motivations and imperatives of the classic quest and offers fresh testimony about the implications of its outcome-a survival strategy often taken for granted. Repudiation of the domestic sphere by her female quester enlarges the central tradition to include women but leaves them still at the crossroads in a materialistic, patriarchal society. Robinson consciously sets her novel against the great texts of the American tradition. She opens Housekeeping, her first book, with a brief sentence that echoes the famous beginning of Moby-Dick-that prime American text about a castaway and survivor with a significant Biblical name: "My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her

The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties.@@@Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry.

Abstract: Arguing that homosexual poetry is part of the mainstream of poetic writing-not a distinct and differentiated category within it-Gregory Woods provides a fastidious study of homosexual poetry in the twentieth century that emphasizes the homo erotic themes in the works of D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, and Thom Gunn. Woods's controlled and elegant study demonstrates that a critic who ignores the sexual orientation of a poet, particularly a love poet, risks overlooking the significance of the poetry itself.

Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life

Abstract: AlWTE read a biography, or two, or three about Ernest Hemingway and we think we know him. Or given what seems to be the current fashion, we write a biography and think we have driven a dagger into his heart. To continue the paraphrase from Wallace Stevens, we think we have laid his brain upon the board, and picked the acrid colors out. We feel so very confident in judging him, categorizing him, labeling him, and appropriating him to our own purposes. We might do better to treat him as an alien consciousness that we must approach with caution: "Danger-there is something here that we will never totally understand." We think we know the man, but between author and reader is a distance, an "otherness," only occasionally closed by our common humanity, and because we think we know the man, we think we know the work. But between the author and his art there is a process that must be recognized and a distance established by a difference in kind that must be constantly acknowledged. Never, with the possible exceptions of the notoriety of the scandalous Lord Byron and the cult worship of Goethe by the youth of Germany, has the life of an author been of such consummate interest and never in recent times has a life had so much influence on our perception and evaluation of the work. And it would seem that it has been nearly impossible to write at length about the fiction of Ernest Hemingway without referring to the author's life and ultimately mixing the fiction and the life together. Recent theorists pooh-poohing the relevance of biography to literary study have proposed that "the author is

Dramatizations of Manhood in Hemingway's In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises

Abstract: I Nthe bullring, men are made or unmanned. The "kid," in the first bullfight vignette of Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, submits to the code of the ring and, by killing five times, reaches his majority. Then, remarks the narrator, "He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him."' Such modest concealment does not satisfy the delighted crowd, which "hollered and threw things down into the bull ring," recognizing that this kid has "finally made it," in this moment, to manhood. Villalta, the matador at the height of his powers, plays to the crowd more deliberately. His killing becomes a test of intense watching as he "sighted" the bull along the sword blade and the bull "look[ed] at him straight in front, hating." With Villalta's life and manhood on the line, the crowd watches and roars with every pass of the muleta. The vignette refers repeatedly to the bullfight's quality of spectacle. "If it happened right down close in front of you, you could see Villalta snarl at the bull and curse him," begins the narrator: the observer becomes you" the reader, and Villalta the cynosure of all eyes. At the end, Villalta's "hand up at the crowd" announces the successful completion of this ritual of manhood-and acknowledges its essentially theatrical nature. The physical characteristics of the ring shape the rituals enacted there, providing necessary boundaries within which potentially chaotic action may reveal a comprehensible structure. The presence of the audience, in particular, is crucial for the transformation of space into arena. Acting as an agent of legitimation for ritual gestures made in the ring, the audience assimilates all action to performance and invests performance with value.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Intention in "Chiefly About War Matters"

Abstract: DESPITE its notoriety among Hawthorne specialists, "Chiefly iLl About War Matters" remains one of the author's least known and appreciated writings published during his lifetime. Hawthorne's motive in what is alleged to have been an act of authorial self-censorship has not been clearly understood. Neither has evidence to the contrary been fully examined. Traditionally, an imprecise account of disagreements that arose between Hawthorne and his publishers has beclouded the genesis of the text, confusing elements of Hawthorne's intentional satire with reported last-minute concessions to suppress and nullify parts of the original version. The following analysis of what happened brings the essay into its proper light and takes a first step toward a critical appreciation of its true character. Although expurgations did occur, the facts derived from the evidence as a whole indicate that Hawthorne had originally devised his essay in great part as a censorship hoax. As a result of constraints he felt while trying to write honestly about the war, he created a satirical dialectic between his narrator and an imaginary editor. Through this ventriloquism, which has been misapprehended as self-censorship, Hawthorne's essay communicates the importance of maintaining freedom of speech while it is most severely tested, when the passions of a nation in turmoil threaten to suppress it.

The Endings of Hemingway's Garden of Eden

Abstract: BIBLIOGRAPHICAL purists may never be happy with the concept of a posthumous novel edited by someone other than the author. Nor are scholars the only ones who have such reservations. Even Jack Hemingway, who stands to gain financially from the posthumous publication of his father's works, has remarked, "Much of the posthumous work would have been rejected out of hand by [Hemingway's] own critical faculty without extensive rewriting-cutting and pruning he would have refused to have anyone do but himself." Jack's brother Patrick, feeling ambivalent about the publication of the unfinished works, stresses the importance of readers' remembering that the posthumous works were never edited into final form by Hemingway himself.' Nevertheless, most readers are grateful to Tom Jenks, the Scribner editor who put the large manuscript into publishable shape so that all might see new facets of a standard American author. An examination of the manuscript of The Garden of Eden suggests that Jenks probably performed his job as well as nearly anyone but Hemingway himself could have done. That job, like that of a novelist, was not to provide a definitive text with notes and tables of variant readings but to produce a readable story in which the major themes come together to make a coherent statement about life. Jenks got most of the good material that was in the manuscript and cut out many distracting elements. Yet in handling the ending of the novel, Jenks departed radically from Hemingway's express intentions. Anyone reading The Garden of Eden must be struck by the

The Social Vision of The Spoils of Poynton

Abstract: THE Spoils of Poynton has a special place in the Henry James canon as the first long work of fiction composed after his disastrous foray into the writing of plays and as a decisive turn from his realist episode of the i88os toward the dramas of consciousness that were to be his chosen subject until the end of his career. Richard H. Brodhead has recently argued that James abandoned realism as a literary mode not only because of the dismal public response to his two long novels but because the assumptions about motive and the social determinants of behavior implicit in realism ran counter to James's own conception of human psychology. Brodhead sees the shift in The Princess Casamassima from the portrayal of social forces in the first half of the novel to the internal conflict of Hyacinth in the second half as prefiguring James's abandonment of the realist project.1 It is possible, however, to see in The Spoils of Poynton remaining traces of James's social concerns. Indeed, the resultant sense of uncertainties about intentions, remarked upon by R. P. Blackmur, has contributed to the continuing critical disagreements about motives and values, centering on the figure of Fleda Vetch, that have marked discussions of the novel.2 What makes The Spoils of Poynton exceptionally interesting is not only that it partially recapitulates and completes the shift in novelistic intention traced by Brodhead in The Princess Casamassima but that in its portrayal of the social world it offers another motive

Gender, Race, and Language in Light in August

Abstract: W~THEN Byron Bunch hears Lena Grove's "moaning wail" during childbirth, he realizes that she seems "to be speaking clearly to something in a tongue which he knew was not his tongue nor that of any man."' Women's language in Light in August may be clearly spoken, but it obscures discourse rather than illuminating it. Faulkner's women are not silenced but marginalized in a fictional world controlled by men and their language. Andre Bleikasten notes, "With Faulkner, the Father -especially the Dead Father-is always the one who names, places, marks, the one who casts the spell, whether through his voice or his eyes."2 The father circumscribes, imposes limits and definitions. In Light in August, however, Faulkner also testifies to a counterforce embodied in Lena's unknown tongue, which can be viewed as a female challenge to the traditionally male "mastery" of language. His women characters evade the boundaries and categories by which the men attempt to control them. Faulkner's subtle manipulation of sexual dynamics and gender roles within the novel illustrates the full complexity of his presentation of power and authority. The father may exercise the linguistic power of naming, but the mother's foreign language complicates and undercuts the language and power of the father. Interestingly, Faulkner associates this anti-patriarchal foreign language not only with women but also with blacks, as will be seen in the career of Joe Christmas. Most scholars tend to focus their attention on this theme of patriarchal power, admittedly always a significant force in Faulk-

"The Revision of the Western in E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times"

Abstract: N the late 1950S and the early I96os, many writers beginning their literary careers grew convinced that the existing artistic conventions of the novel were no longer viable, since the realistic aesthetic of the nineteenth century, the modernist experimentation of the early part of the twentieth, and the liberal and existential novel of the period after World War II all seemed either limiting or impoverished. Some of the work of reinvigoration of the novel undertaken by this new generation of writers can be related to Roman Jakobson's theory that as a form of literature evolves there is a shift in the hierarchy of genres within it, so that in times of change "genres which were originally secondary paths, subsidiary variants, now come to the fore, whereas the canonical genres are pushed toward the rear." 1 In the revitalization of fiction that occurred in the I96os, in fact, one important trend, which emerged in opposition to the aristocratic cultu'ral theory of the modernist period, centered on the assimilation into mainstream literature of such "ephemeral" genres as science fiction, the detective story, pornography, and the western, genres which were employed by the new writers with great literary sophistication and were made to yield meanings relevant to their contemporary world.2 The popular western attracted the attention of young writers in the I96os not only because of this general shift in literary trends but also because, in the sociopolitical climate of the times, the vision of the west which such works projected invited ironic

Flannery O'Connor's Others: Freud, Lacan, and the Unconscious

Abstract: ions of human law, authority, Otherness. By her resistance to the old man's narcissistic identification with her, Mary Fortune forces the old man to look at the difference not only between him and her but also between an individual tree-perhaps the tree-and the backdrop of sacred, sacramental woods. The woods are special because of their identification, by O'Connor, with the figure of Christ. The first paragraph of the story speaks of the "black line of woods which appeared," Christ-like, "to walk across the water" (CS, p. 335; LA, p. 525). The sacramental significance becomes much clearer in the episode, near the story's end, when the old man fails to see it. "Several times during the afternoon," O'Connor writes, "he got up from his bed and looked out the window across the 'lawn' to the line of woods she said they wouldn't be able to see any more. Every time he saw the same thing: woods . . . , just woods" (CS, p. 348; LA, p. 538). Though the intended significance of the woods as Other is lost on the old man, it is clear in the text that the Otherness they represent is God or God's other and double, Christ. The third time he got up to look at the woods, it was almost six o'clock and the gaunt trunks appeared to be raised in a pool of red light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them. The old man stared for some time, as if for a prolonged instant he were caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future and were held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that he had not apprehended before. He saw it, in his hallucination, as f someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood. (CS, p. 348; LA, p. 538; emphasis added) In O'Connor's theological terms, it is evident that the old man's rejection of the significance of his vision is a rejection as well of Christian salvation. In Lacanian terms, the rejection simply means that he has clung to the enervating engagements of his childish narcissism. That narcissism will not only lead him to his death, but it will also lead to the death of the one who has been his narcissistic other, his better "self," and potentially his guide-should he follow her-to grace. By rejecting the Other signified by the woods in O'Connor's text, old man Fortune rejects knowledge of the limits imposed This content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:29:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 640 American Literature by what Freudians call castration, what we might call limitation or finitude, and Lacan calls the Law of the Name-of-the-Father. All the imagery of blood found in the old man's vision of the woods joins Christian and psychoanalytic themes, for it may be associated not with the Crucifixion alone but also with castration, the father's imposition of his ultimate authority over the son. The rejection of the knowledge of castration connotes a determination to remain within the untrammeled domain of narcissism. Since the old man's narcissistic image of self-the child-has now manifested a contrary determination to ally herself with the father-Pitts-and thus with the Name of the Father (theologically, God; psychoanalytically, the Other), she no longer satisfies old man Fortune's identificatory narcissistic needs, which have now been transferred to that serpentine storeowner, Tilman. She is immediately transformed, by the old man's psyche, into an image of the "bad" other, one who must be dealt with as aggressively as the child's mother. In her he now sees "the Pitts look, pure and simple, and he felt personally stained by it, as if it had been found on his own face" (CS, p. 351; LA, p. 54I). So, he thinks, "his trouble with her had always been that he had not shown enough firmness. He had been too generous" (CS, p. 352; LA, p. 542). Thus he must exercise an authority over her such as that exercised by Pitts. In what can only be regarded, psychoanalytically, as a usurpation, old man Fortune attempts to perform the same disciplinary tactic as Pitts. He takes the child to "the exact spot where he had seen Pitts take his belt to her" (CS, p. 353; L,A, p. 544). But Mary Fortune, who now has accepted knowledge of the law in the name of the father, recognizes that her proper name is not Fortune but Pitts. Yet it is not the name so much as the law of the name that is important. Though she repeatedly denies to the old man that Pitts has beaten her, she does so for a simple reason: it was the law punishing her, not anyone, least of all not her mere fleshly father. Thus she is not about to accept the old man's usurpation of her father's lawful authority without a fight. When Fortune tries to beat her, "She was on him so quickly that he could not have recalled which blow he felt first." Making him feel "as if he were being attacked not by one child but by a pack of small demons all with stout brown school shoes and This content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:29:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms O'Connor's Others 641 small rocklike fists" (CS, p. 354; LA, p. 545), the child forces the old man at least momentarily to acknowledge what he really is: "Stop!" he wheezed. "I'm your grandfather!" She paused, her face exactly on top of his. Pale identical eye looked into pale identical eye. "Have you had enough?" she asked. The old man looked up into his own image. It was triumphant and hostile. "You been whipped," it said, "by me," and then it added, bearing down on each word, "and I'm PURE Pitts." (CS, p. 355; LA, p. 545; emphasis added) In those words O'Connor suggests that the old man has glimpsed his Other; it is not Mary Fortune who speaks (despite what most critics infer); instead, it is the "it," the Id, the Other indicated in the saying of Freud that Lacan fastens upon: Wo es war, soll Ich werden (Ecrits, pp. 128-29, 171, 299-300, 31314), meaning, "Where It/Id is, there also shall I/Ego be." The "I" is determined, Freud and Lacan say, by the Other of the unconscious. The child is now, at least in the old man's eye/ "I," an extension not of himself but of his Oedipal arch-enemy Pitts. Were the old man to remain in Symbolic subjugation to her he would in effect be in the "proper" place on the Lacanian quadrangle of the subject. The quadrangle's four points-based in Lacan's description on the game "Puss-in-the-Corner," says Catherine Clement 2`are the subject, the other, the moi, and the Other. Narcissistic interactions, Lacan teaches, are located on the axis lying between the other and the moi, the unconscious self that is founded on the subject's experience of language and images absorbed in infancy. When it is neurotically attached to the narcissistic engagements, the subject (called je, the "I," by Lacan) effectively denies the authoritative Other that underlies all "normal" psychic effects. This Other is located, in the quadrangle of Fortune's psyche, where "PURE Pitts" stands; Fortune's narcissistic "other" (note the little o) is located where "pure FORTUNE" stands, and represents the overweening demands of infantile narcissism. Again, were the old man to remain beneath Mary Fortune PITTS, he would signify his "proper," or "normal," relation to that Other for which she now 12 The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, I983), p. i66. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:29:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 642 American Literature substitutes. But he does not accept that subjugation. Worse yet, he destroys quite finally any opportunity he will ever have to achieve a proper relation. With a sudden surge of strength, he managed to roll over and reverse their positions so that he was looking down into the face that was his own but had dared to call itself Pitts. With his hands still tight around her neck, he lifted her head and brought it down once hard against the rock that happened to be under it. Then he brought it down twice more. Then looking into the face in which the eyes, slowly rolling back, appeared to pay him not the slightest attention, he said, "There's not an ounce of Pitts in me." (CS, p. 355; LA, p. 545) He can now look down on his "conquered image," but that image is no longer merely the narcissistic image that has to be overcome; having become the very image of his Other, the child takes with her his opportunity for what O'Connor would regard as Christian grace and what Lacan would regard as his opportunity to gain or regain psychic normality. Killing the child who is pure PITTS now, the old man kills not his mirroring, narcissistic, Imaginary other, but his Other in the register of the Symbolic-a far graver crime, indeed, one that in psychoanalytic terms equals the murder of God in the Christian subject's denial of God's grace.

American Indian Autobiography.

Abstract: American Indian autobiography is a kind of cultural kaleidoscope. The narratives come to us from many different Indiansfrom Crows, Hidatsas, Navajos, Osages, Kiowas, Hopis, Pequods, Chippewas, Kwakiutlsfrom warriors, farmers, Christian converts, rebels and assimilationists, Peyotists, shamans, hunters, Sun Dancers, artists and Hollywood Indians, spiritualists, visionaries, mothers, fathers, and English professors. And if this is not variety enough, we might remember that many of these narratives are as-told-to autobiographiesand those who set them down in writing are nearly as diverse as their subjects. Black Elk had a poet for his amanuensis; Maxidiwiac, a Hidatsa farmer who worked her fields with a bone-blade hoe, had an anthropologist, and so on. David Brumble discusses these remarkable narratives in historical terms. The effects, for example, of the editors' assumptions and methods upon autobiographies and autobiographers are never far from his attention. But \"American Indian Autobiography\" alsoand perhaps most importantdescribes the Indians' own oral autobiographical traditions. Brumble insists upon the continuing influence of these traditions, right down to the very literate autobiographies of N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko. The book includes an extensive bibliography, which lists all the autobiographies mentioned and brings up to date the author's previous \"Annotated Bibliography.\" It is thus an invaluable resource for students of Native American subjects and American history and literature, as well as a gripping narrative in itself.\

The Thoreauvian Pilgrimage: The Structure of an American Cult

Abstract: rHE subject of canonization has prompted much innovative work in recent American literary history and theory. This scholarship has established that canons are culture-specific instruments of promotion and exclusion, and it has begun to explain canonical formation and change in terms of models of cultural hegemony more complex and hard-headed than traditional historicists and New Critics employed: models that take into account not just aesthetic fashion and the philosophical temper of the age but also the more tangible power conferred by race, gender, and class. Since it began as a challenge to the received conception of who are the major authors deserving close study, the newer scholarship has understandably concentrated on the claims of figures marginalized by the received canon and on questioning the unexamined assumptions behind such exclusions. Little has been written about the phenomenon of canonical investment itself: that is, the rituals of remembrance through which those regarded for whatever reason as literary heroes become enshrined. Hence the present article, which examines the major forms of public reverence for Thoreau in particular and Transcendental Concord in general. Since Thoreau has become the closest approximation to a folk hero that American literary history has ever seen, and since Concord is still America's most sacred literary spot, this will be a case study representative in the Emersonian rather than in the statistical sense. But by the same token it should help to show that the sacral vocabulary drawn from biblical studies and hagiography by critical discussions of literary canonization points to patterns of behavior and experience that run deeper than such analogizing generally claims, patterns that substantiate the present climate of skepticism toward

As I Lay Dying: Demise of Vision

Abstract: THE criticism of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying manifests the heterogeneity, the ambivalence, and the outright contradiction that characterize Faulkner criticism in general.' Meanwhile the work continues to provoke ever more provocative commentary. Among traditional interpretations that even yet attempt to find meaning as statement, nontraditional readings are beginning to let the meaning lie while they follow Faulkner's strange experiments with time and space, with memory and imagination, with consciousness and unconsciousness.2 Still, whatever the reading, it is usually expressed in terms of rationalist thinking, i.e., in negative terms, as disruption, disjunction, vacancy, and absence, as distortion and loss. The only novelty I hope to offer is that my interest is to describe what shows up or what happens where old meanings have disappeared without merely speaking in reverse. Exploring the novel's explicit treatment of language, my study will make its way literally along, searching the bare bones of the narrative, attempting not to repeat or to archaeologically reconstitute the work, but to follow alongside it in a thinking. It is Addie who gives emphasis to (raises the spectre of) language as such. Words, she claims, are ineffectual.

The Southern Agrarians.

Abstract: The southern Agrarians were a group of twelve young men who joined, from 1929 to 1937, in a fascinating intellectual and political movement. Prominent among them were Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Donald Davidson. In the midst of the depression, these gifted writers tried, as did so many other intellectuals, to plot the best cultural and economic choices open to southerners and Americans as a whole. That they failed to gain most of their goals does not diminish the significance of their crusade, or the enduring values that they espoused. Interweaving group biography and intellectual history, Conkin traces how these young intellectuals came to write their classic manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, relates their political advocacy to the earlier Fugitive movement in poetry, and follows their careers after the Agrarian crusade fell apart. More than any other historian or critic, Conkin takes seriously the economic and political beliefs of these southern writers.

"Shantih" in The Waste Land

Abstract: THE last line of The Waste Land has the singular distinction of having baffled the best commentators on the poem. On the one hand, their bafflement results in absolute incomprehension as in George Williamson's equation of "shantih" with the mad raving of Hieronymo,1 or in such suspicion as A. D. Moody's "that the Sanskrit is meant not to be readily understood"2 by Western readers. On the other hand, a commentator like David Ward wonders why a poem "so little like the Upanishads in its moral and spiritual universe" ends with the "blessing or greeting of peace."3 Evidently, like the other cryptic allusions in The Waste Land, "shantih" makes us feel the inadequacy of annotations; we "know and do not know." This is particularly true of Cleo M. Kearns's more recent attempt to read the last line of the poem in the twin contexts of the Hindu tradition and the modernist poem. Much as I value Kearns's interpretation for recognizing not only the mantric character of the word but its kinship with Om, I cannot accept her conclusion that the poet quibbles with "shantih" which at once becomes "immediate experience and meditated knowledge."4 In this note therefore, I shall advert to the Upanishadic tradition of chanting the Santih mantra in order to comprehend "shantih" in the larger context of the Hindu tradition and the specific context of its use in The Waste Land. I shall further argue that, given this understanding, a reader might find nothing more devastatingly ironic in the whole poem than its last line.

Reevaluating Mark Twain's Novel of Hawaii

Abstract: TN I884 Mark Twain was not only seeing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the press but also completing another novel, one set in Hawaii and based on what he had learned during and after his i866 visit to the Islands. Extant fragments and his own comments about the never-published work show that Twain saw it as a complex and somehow troubling project combining the idyllic, the heroic, and the tragic in ways that contradicted the simplistic conventions of a Hawaiian paradise that by Twain's time were already evident in advertisements for tourism. Not having survived and almost never noticed in the century since he wrote it, Twain's Hawaii novel cannot be said to have influenced the course of American literary traditions concerning Hawaii and the Pacific. But however obliquely and humorously he addressed certain issues in his writings about "the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, vestiges of the novel suggest that in it, Twain brought to a peak his serious thoughts about Hawaii, sitting as the Kingdom was in the path of America's Manifest Destiny. Thanks mainly to Roughing It (I872), even casual readers of Twain know that early in his writing career he visited and wrote about Hawaii. Yet while he satirized certain popular views of Hawaii, Hawaiians, and their place in the Western imagination, his remarks have typically been taken, even by scholars, as endorsements of the paradise image the Hawaii tourist industry has promoted.1 Contrary to its apparent breeziness, Twain's total