Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2011"

Marianne Moore's Precision

Abstract: T marianne moore is a “precise” poet has long been a commonplace of Moore criticism. “We are now used to calling Marianne Moore an observer of unique precision,” Evelyn Feldman and Michael Barsanti write (7), while Bonnie Costello indicates that “precision is [Moore’s] passion” (Marianne Moore 38). Robin G. Schulze, meanwhile, indicts Grace Schulman’s edition of Moore’s poems (2003) because, as she puts it, “the saddest argument that this entire edition makes is that Moore was not very precise” (“How Not to Edit” 132). Schulze’s comment, suggesting that any half-awake reader of Moore should know better than to suggest that Moore was not precise, reveals how central the idea of precision—or as Schulman herself puts it, “exactitude”—has come to be for Moore studies (xxvi). Precision is perhaps the most widely agreed-upon feature of Moore’s poetics, and as a mode of securing knowledge, it has served to ratify Moore’s position as a central figure of American modernism. Modernist writers sought to create a literature that constituted real knowledge, knowledge in a strong sense, of which scientific knowledge was, at the turn of the twentieth century, the gold standard. As Thorstein Veblen put it in 1906, “modern common-sense holds that the scientist’s answer is the only ultimately true one” (4). Thus Ezra Pound could write approvingly that “if Marconi says something about ultra-short waves it MEANS something. Its meaning can only be properly estimated by someone who KNOWS” (A B C 25). Marconi, the physicist-inventor, and not the poet or the literature professor, was the exemplar of the

"Male and Male and Male": John Rechy and the Scene of Representation

Abstract: J h n r e c h y ’ s n o t o r i e t y a s a w r i t e r h a s seemingly been based on his documentation of gay male subcultures in the 1960s and ’70s. The jacket cover to the first edition of City of Night, for example, declares the novel a “bold . . . account of the urban underworld of male prostitution” and “an unforgettable look at life on the edge.” It would seem that Rechy’s essential contribution to American letters was quite simply to bring his own “true-life” experiences with gay sex to respectable middle class readers, presumably unfamiliar with such “underworlds” in 1963, yet inexplicably curious about them. Since this is what Rechy is typically praised for (if usually in less stark terms), one wonders whether, without this ethnographic and even autobiographic aspect, Rechy’s novels would have been the success that they were? Rechy, for one, seems to authorize and validate this truth-value in his novels. He explicitly describes his most philosophical text, The Sexual Outlaw, as a “prose-documentary,” recording for the reader “sexhunts throughout Los Angeles for three days and nights” (15). It is wellknown, as it was at the time he was writing, that Rechy participated first-hand in the worlds he describes: California body-building culture, hustling and cruising on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, etc. And Rechy’s most notorious display of his own life in

The Souls of Henry Adams: Du Boisian Aspects of The Education

Abstract: With such standards, the Bostonian could not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing. . . . The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran through life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites. . . . for him, life was double. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

Manhattan Transfer, Spectacular Time, and the Outmoded

Abstract: M spectacle , l ike more tradit ional historical forms—in which repeated rituals enact shared community values—organizes a public collectivity around its visual centrality. But in following the temporal reproducibility of the commodity form, capitalist spectacle during the second technological revolution dramatizes the experience of the eternally new we customarily associate with modernity, and infuses American literary modernism with unprecedented energies, electric flows, and promiscuous, nervous desires. In its various guises—including advertising, photography, cinema, and the dissemination of spectacular events in the popular press—spectacle also performs and embodies the exponential reproduction of surplus for a presumably collective vision. And in the sprawling historical diorama of 1920s New York that is John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, a jittery fixation on spectacular pleasures of the now, strangely defined by their future outmoded or obsolete status, expresses an epistemology of public being and consumer citizenship that is central to the feeling of temporal and historical dislocation operative within much of American modernism. In her study of cinematic time, Mary Anne Doane argues for two key modalities of modernity that might be useful here: “abstraction/ rationalization and emphasis on the contingent” (10–11). The rapid technological advance and economic expansion marking the dawn of

American Psycho: Neoliberal Fantasies and the Death of Downtown

Abstract: Fantasies and the Death of Downtown S within the blighted and economically polarized geography of 1980s New York City, Bret Easton Ellis’s neoliberal revenge satire, American Psycho (1991), greets its reader with a chilling smear of graffiti that conflates Dante’s Inferno with Marx’s guided tour in Capital with “Mr. Moneybags. . . . into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business’” (279–80).1 “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood-red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank,” Ellis writes in the opening line as he begins to render in visceral detail what Marx called “the secret of profit making” (Ellis 3; Marx 280). The secret formula of profit in American Psycho is violence, exploitation, and reification, and what Ellis’s novel palpably dramatizes through the handsome, Harvard-educated, Wall Street investment executive and serial killer Patrick Bateman is what it feels like to have one’s labor forcibly expropriated through the reduction of oneself to human material. American Psycho translates for readers the massive social costs of neoliberal economics into a terrifyingly intimate experience of violence by a psychotic subject who embodies neoliberal theory and performs it through his repeated acts of disembowelment. The first assault in American Psycho, a confrontation that I will consider more fully in the pages that follow, makes this claim painfully clear. It is against a “bum, a black man” sleeping among “bags of garbage” in the East Village where Bateman is out on the prowl in “a silk-lined coat . . . by Luciano Soprani” that soon will be stained with flecks of blood (126). Before slicing the man’s eyes and leaving him to bleed to death, Bate-

Discomfort Food: Analogy, Biotechnology, and Risk in Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation

Abstract: W wrong with genetically modified foods—those products judged “substantially equivalent” and fed to North American consumers willy-nilly; the same ones rejected for so long (and in some quarters still) by the European Union, and turned back at one point by the boatload when sent to Zambia1—the “StarLinkTM” corn, the “Roundup Ready®” canola, the “GenuityTM” soybeans? Answers, naturally, vary from “nothing” to “everything” and myriad points in between. And I ask the question as a layperson, for, as someone trained in literary criticism, in the reading and interpretation of texts, I am hardly qualified to answer it. Of course, lack of expertise in biology has not stopped literary and cultural critics from commenting on genetic technologies in the past. Indeed, whether it is because we cannot resist intervening in discourse surrounding something persistently referred to as “like a language,” or simply because we, like all human and nonhuman beings on the planet, are increasingly surrounded by new life forms—including transgenics, which cross

Thoreau's Inner Animal

Abstract: I a well-known 1856 letter, thoreau wrote to his friend H. G. O. Blake about Walt Whitman, whom he had met for the first time the previous month. Thoreau reports that he has just read the second edition of Leaves of Grass, which “has done me more good than any reading for a long time” (Correspondence 444). Yet his enthusiastic praise for this “exhilarating” new poetry is qualified from the start by reservations about the explicitness of what he calls its “sensuality.” He complains, “It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt, there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants” (444–45). Thoreau figures overt erotic expression as animal speech, suggesting that his anxious concern with sexuality is caught up in the question of the distinction between the human and the animal, often understood to hinge on the possession of language. What seems troubling about Whitman’s poetry is imagined as boundary-crossing, animals exhibiting a humanlike capacity for speech, or humans speaking as animals would if they possessed language, openly discussing beastly matters.1 Shame also signals the transgression of this boundary between human and animal, the impropriety that Thoreau attributes to Whitman’s poetry. Men have reason to be ashamed of their sexuality (and perhaps would feel no shame without the faculty of reason); shame appears here to be a uniquely human emotion. Only in “dens” inhabited presumably by ani-

Violent Fraternities and White Reform: The Complementary Fictions of Albion Tourgée and Thomas Dixon

Abstract: T first sixty years or so of the fledgling nation’s political order resulted in Civil War, and those cultural critics and civic leaders who came to political maturity during the war and rose to prominence in its aftermath inherited a national obsession with an idealized and elusive notion of American democracy and its attendant tradition of violence. In the postwar years, Radical Republicans and conservative southerners alike deployed appeals to democracy and the nation’s foundational ideals to support their contentious political positions, but they were operating with decidedly different working definitions of what “democracy” actually looked like, both theoretically and in practice. As George C. Rable has observed of the Reconstruction era generally, the doctrines of classical liberalism “were distorted for conservative purposes by businessmen and Republican politicians as well as by white southerners attempting to preserve their most sacred values” (1). These clashing ideological pursuits often led to violence enacted in the name of one or another conflicting definition of democracy asserted on behalf of the American people. Questions of citizenship and national belonging were central to these debates, as the political and literary works of civil rights activist Albion W. Tourgée and, a generation later, white supremacist demagogue Thomas Dixon, Jr., attest. The Reconstruction novels of Tourgée and Dixon exemplify postwar cultural negotiations concerning the place of violence in politi-

Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive, America, and the Blind Man of Philosophy

Abstract: R tyler’s early-republic barbary-hostage tale, The Algerine Captive (1797), owns the distinction of being one of America’s first novels and one of its least effective abolitionist texts. The story of a white American’s enslavement by African pirates, based on historical events during the Washington presidency, Tyler’s narrative has challenged readers desiring to rescue a compelling indictment of slavery’s practice in the “Barbary states of America” from a satire that just as enthusiastically targets dueling, medical quackery, and classical education.1 The work’s reception has reflected its uneven focus. Hailed as the emergence of a “tough-minded realism” in the American imaginary and as proof the national character developed from sensibility, the novel has been criticized for its irreligion and its piety, for its didacticism as well as for its failure to sustain a “moral imperative.” And it has been condemned as derivative of Roderick Random, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Rabelais, Candide, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, while lauded for its “intertextuality.”2 Some have suggested The Algerine Captive is not a novel at all, a suggestion I want to resist with the claim the text engages period philosophical issues that had great importance for the former colonies, ones the novel as a genre was particularly well suited to address.3 If Tyler’s text suffers from an identity crisis, in other words, it only too accurately mirrors the new nation’s struggle to make a place for itself on the world stage. The Algerine Captive appeared, after all, at a desperate time in American history. Fearing contagion from the French Revolution,

"el brujo es un coyote": Taxonomies of Trauma in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Abstract: In september 1835, responding to the intensification of Apache raiding and depredation, the government of Sonora, Mexico enacted a law establishing a bounty system of one hundred pesos for the scalp of each Apache warrior, fifty pesos for the scalp of each Apache woman, and twenty-five for that of each child. Two years later the governor of the state of Chihuahua instituted a similar measure known as the Proyecto de Guerro, which together according to historian Edward Spicer, marked the commencement of a “war of extermination” against the Apache that would continue unabated for well over forty years (240). The internecine conflict resulting from these policies, which forms the basis of Cormac McCarthy’s 1985

Becoming an American in Paris: the Romance of the Commune in the 1890s

Abstract: I the late 1990s, prestonspeed publications began reissuing the adventure fiction of popular fin-de-siècle British boys’ writer G. A. Henty for an American homeschooling audience. Several more small presses followed suit, and soon the “smashing success” of Henty’s sales in the homeschooling market began to garner attention in such prominent publications as The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times even as the books themselves became the centerpiece of the popular “Robinson Curriculum” for homeschoolers (Oppenheimer).1 This resurgence of Henty mania in America was itself marketed as and fueled by an investment in déjà vu: publishers like Robinson Books and Lost Classics take pains to remind parents that these boys’ books were wildly popular with U.S. readers at the turn of the twentieth century, while Evangelical ministry websites like Vision Forum, as if taking a page from Theodore Roosevelt, aim to “rebuild a culture of courageous boyhood” through, among other things, the reading of Henty (“All-American”).2 But Henty’s appeal for U.S. homeschoolers also has its roots in the successful packaging of his formulaic historical fictions as history; indeed, as one publisher puts it, they altogether “alleviate the need for [history] textbooks”—a claim that itself rehashes Henty’s own turn-of-the-

The Frontier Ethic behind Cormac McCarthy's Southern Fiction

Abstract: W the publication of ‘all the pretty horses’ in 1992, Cormac McCarthy finally earned national critical attention as a formidable contemporary writer, though by this time he had already been writing for three decades, producing five novels that were reviewed without enthusiasm and that were largely ignored by the reading public. Critics have struggled to penetrate the difficult prose and obscure plotlines of McCarthy’s early fiction, and he has often been accused of producing incoherent novels that exhibit stylistic innovation without any meaning. Reviewers of the southern novels have complained that McCarthy’s words “darken rather than illuminate time sequences, character relationships, and indeed even what is happening at any given moment” and “seem to exist for their own sake only” (Murray 866); that “there is no real point” to the “trail of very literary epithets which look impressive unless you are unkind enough to ask what they really mean” (Cruttwell 18); and that McCarthy’s elegant prose “explores nothing at all” in terms of theme or content (Prescott 67).1 The perceived lack of meaning and coherence in McCarthy’s southern fiction has prompted some critics to label the early work as nihilistic. Vereen M. Bell, in “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy,” contends that “McCarthy’s novels are as innocent of theme and of ethical reference as they are of plot” (31), and Mark Royden Winchell argues that the main difference between McCarthy and Faulkner is that “Faulkner was at heart a moralist who believed in an irreducible core of human dignity. His works possess a moral center, either explicit or

Saying "Nothing" and Meaning "Everything" in The Golden Bowl

Abstract: H james’s short story “maud evelyn” ends with the promise of that most promising quantity, “everything.” The pledge comes from Lady Emma, who anticipates seeing relics of the deceased Maud Evelyn when she visits the Dedricks and says she will tell her friend all about it: “Next week I shall go with her—I shall see them at last. Tell you about them, you say? My dear man, everything” (CS 205). “Everything” is the story to come; it is Lady Emma’s assurance that she will divulge whatever it is she comes to know. In James’s hands, everything contains all—and nothing—at the same time. Increasingly in the late-phase writing, everything operates as a narrative punch line that is not exactly delivered. It stands for a consummate knowledge (encompassing all that matters, promising to fulfill and explain the text’s gaps) even as what the word explicitly stands for is not finally consummated within the text. Nobody ever says what everything has ambiguously or conspicuously referred to. This relationship between everything and degrees of knowing can be seen in the way James uses other indefinite pronouns as well. He employs –thing and –body words such as everything, nothing, anything, anybody, somebody both to gesture toward a character’s knowledge of something and to calibrate the reader’s degree of being privy—privy to all the sightlines and spoken lines within the novel.1 These pronouns challenge the reader to interpret and construct the story above and beyond the initial level of significance that can be assigned to characters’ state-

Whitman's War and the Status of Literature

Abstract: W the critical landscape still bears the powerful imprint of the linguistic turn, and its focus on epistemological issues, the opening lines of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sound refreshingly obsolete: “I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (188).1 In a leap of undisguised arrogance, Whitman’s poetics affirms the communicative transparency of language, the capacity to share one’s life in words, and to embody other people’s experiences within the text, beyond spatial, temporal, sexual or racial lines: “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, / Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, / Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man” (203).2 Extending his omnivorous polymorphism beyond the accepted contours of America’s system of legal and political representation, the poet even turns into “The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat” (225). And yet, the cosmic, all-encompassing bard of America’s letters can also be a poet of opaque uncertainty, untranslatable contradictions and invisible fugitivity: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / . . . / I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / . . . / You will hardly know who I am or what I mean” (246–47). Throughout Whitman’s corpus, the affirmative tone of his poetic litany is interspersed with not-so-rare moments of doubt and uncertainty. While “There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,” the lists of catalogues, enumerations, interjections and exclamations often cede the way to parenthetical spaces, suspended questions and other textual markers of hesitancy: “(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips)” (240, 230).

Conveniently Situated Museums: The House Museum Movement and Modernist Interiority in Willa Cather's The Professor's House

Abstract: I her promotional essay of 1916, “mesa verde Wonderland,” Cather describes at length the remarkable homes of an ancient people. Praising these “strong habitations” for their beauty, their “absence of clutter,” and the “settled, ritualistic life” they once fostered, Cather suggests that within their walls a modern visitor might experience a propinquity to “custom, ritual, [and] integrity of tradition” as distinct from “the “bustling business of the world” (qtd. in Rosowski and Slote 84–86). Yet if Cather argues persuasively for the privileged role of domestic space and housekeeping in the transmission of historical and cultural meaning, she also alludes to the violability of these utopian interiors. In a curious statement, she insists that the Mesa Verde is “the story of an early race” and “not, as many people think, an inconveniently situated museum” (85). While Cather surely gestures to the geographic context and setting that made the Mesa Verde a more compelling reliquary of the past than any urban museum representation of the region, her emphasis on securing the home’s meaning also suggests a different subtext: the conflation of museum and market that was destabilizing the historical and cultural significance of these domestic interiors.1 In the short tale, “Tom Outland’s Story,” inspired by her trip, Cather alludes to the compromised integrity of southwestern domesticities that was an effect of such enterprising efforts. By the 1920s, however, her

Jovita González and Margaret Eimer's Caballero as Memory-Site

Abstract: In fact, memory has never known more than two forms of legitimacy: historical and literary. These have run parallel to each other but until now always separately. At present, the boundary between the two is blurring . . . . History has become the deep reference of a period that has been wrenched from its depths, a realistic novel in a period in which there are no real novels. Memory has been promoted to the center of history: such is the spectacular bereavement of literature.

Flannery O'Connor's Productive Violence

Abstract: This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/arizona_quarterly_a_journal_of_american_literature_culture_and_theory/v067/67.2.fowler.html.

Whitman's Latencies: Hegel and the Politics of Time in Leaves of Grass

Abstract: R of walt whitman all know that something happens to Leaves of Grass after the Civil War. But no one is quite sure what this “something” is. What we do know is that Whitman’s most mutable (and mutated) of books is discernibly different following 1865: its poems tend to be briefer, thinner, and more condensed; its lines are less populated by the bodies of artisans, and more replete with memories and fantasies of return; while death, which Whitman once deemed nothing but “good manure,” comes to acquires a new prominence and irrepressible force (LG 1:80). To account for this transformation, critics have described Whitman’s postwar career as the fruit of a politico-aesthetic weakening or decline. Some scholars point to his additions of titles and line numbers and claim that the postbellum volumes reflect a more conventional poetic sensibility, one that is standardized rather than avant-garde. Others draw attention to Whitman’s postwar politics and contend that his newfound Republicanism leads to an enervation of his verse. According to this reading, Whitman’s fixation on “Unionism,” which culminates in his hagiography of Lincoln, obliges a sacrifice of the very subversiveness upon which the antebellum Leaves hinged. Still other critics, in a more biographical vein, underscore the importance his wartime experiences in Washington’s hospitals and argue that his tending to the sick and wounded, and his abiding attachment to the soldiers who died, engender a modified worldview, one that issues not from the

In the Ring with Mildred Pierce: Million Dollar Baby and Eastwood's Revision of the Forties Melodrama

Abstract: D most film reviews either laud Million Dollar Baby for its “unsentimental” message or concentrate on the right-to-life debate surrounding the “controversial” ending and its relationship to the Terry Schiavo case.1 Few critics decode the film as generating a substantial amount of cultural anxiety about women who foray into hitherto male realms—in particular, into activities as aggressively masculine as boxing. Tania Modleski’s New York Times “Letter to the Editor” is one exception. She chastises Frank Rich for allowing the “right wing media to define the debate over Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby as one about euthanasia,” all the while ignoring “the film’s vile gender, class, and racial politics” (1).2 The numerous ways the film interweaves its gender, class, and racial politics are fairly obvious: Billie the “Blue Bear,” the demonized Black East-German Ex-Prostitute; Maggie’s “white trash” welfare family; and Morgan Freeman’s Scrap, manager of the Hit Pit, who provides the film’s voice-over narration and yet another example of the black man’s recently idealized and God-like presence in film (Colombe 1). While these characters and Eastwood’s more general combination of gender, class, and racial politics are themselves deserving of lengthy analysis, time and length constraints force this article to focus more narrowly on the ways the three main characters—Maggie, Frankie, and Scrap—articulate the gender politics of Million Dollar Baby. This paper argues that at the same time that Million Dollar Baby reflects the contentious debates at the time of its release about what constitutes a family and a woman’s relationship to violence,

Elizabeth Bishop's Closet Drama

Abstract: O the evening of april 11, 1973, elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill shared a stage at New York City’s 92nd Street YM-YWHA. The Y had been trying to get Bishop to read there for many years; when at last she accepted their invitation, June Fortess, the executive secretary of the Poetry Center, wrote a jubilant letter of thanks to the poet, predicting, “April 11th will surely be one of the greatest evenings in Poetry Center history” (92nd St. Y Archives, Fortess to Bishop, 1/17/73). Indeed the Poetry Center did its best to preserve the evening archivally, as an historical event, an effort which was the cause, as Bishop would explain in a letter to Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, of considerable anxiety:

(Ex)Isles in the Harlem Renaissance: The Insular and Archipelagic Topographies of Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry

Abstract: A american writer wallace thurman has been known as the “enfant terrible” of the Harlem Renaissance. After the Salt Lake City native arrived in Harlem in 1925, he quickly assumed the role of bombastic spokesperson for the Renaissance’s younger artists. By November of 1926, he had edited the first and only issue of the magazine Fire!!, a publication that (as Langston Hughes remembered) sought to “burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas” of such influential race magazines as the Crisis, Opportunity, and the Messenger (Big Sea 235–36). Further shoring up Thurman’s image as the Renaissance’s young artist agonistes, he loudly rejected W. E. B. Du Bois’s call to use black expressive culture as propaganda and publicly criticized Alain Locke’s landmark anthology, The New Negro (1925), as a collection revealing “the Negro literary renaissance” as merely “a new source of revenue” for white publishers and a “fad” for “white intellectuals” (“High Low” 219; Henderson 295). Indicative of his sense of radical departure from the aesthetic and propagandistic programs of the Renaissance’s old guard, Thurman in 1928 claimed that the voices of “articulate negroes [sic] of the past” were “so busy justifying their presence [within an] inimical environment that

"The Necessity of an Example": Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition & the Ohio Anti-Lynching Campaign

Abstract: T in 1926 before a senate judiciary committee, James Weldon Johnson spoke out for the dire necessity of a federal anti-lynching bill. In his testimony, Johnson objected to the central argument among opponents of anti-lynching legislation, which held that the federal government had neither the power nor the jurisdiction to prosecute those who participate in mob violence. Cloaked in the legal authority of U.S. v Cruikshank (1875), that argument had accrued force for the past fifty years. For Johnson and others, however, lynching presented a special case. Lynching was more than a crime rarely, if ever, prosecuted under state law when victims were minorities; it was “not simply murder” but “murder plus something else.” It was, Johnson continued, “murder plus revolution and anarchy . . . murder plus a flaunting and overthrowing and tramping under foot of the prerogatives of the courts” (“To Prevent” 29). A quarter century earlier, Charles W. Chesnutt made a similar argument and plea for anti-lynching legislation in The Marrow of Tradition (1901). However, whereas Johnson presented a straightforward attack,

Pacific Speculations: Moby-Dick and Mana

Abstract: He had just come up from the South Seas with John LaFarge, who had reluctantly crawled away toward New York to resume the grinding routine of studio work at an age when life runs low. Adams would rather, as a choice, have gone back to the east, if it were only to sleep forever in the trade-winds under the southern stars, wandering over the dark purple ocean, with its purple sense of solitude and void. Not that he liked the sensation, but that it was the most unearthly that he had felt. —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

The Photograph and the Parenthesis: Walt Whitman, Walter Benjamin, and the Management of Time in "Song of Myself "

Abstract: I the essay that follows, i want to juxtapose what might be regarded as two distinct “moments” in the reader’s encounter with the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The first is so familiar as to be iconic: the daguerreotype portrait of Whitman that occurs at the beginning of the volume. The second is more obscure, and to my knowledge never extensively discussed: a brief parenthetical comment that occupies line 304 of the book’s first poem, eventually titled “Song of Myself.” To facilitate this analysis I’ll make use of Walter Benjamin’s meditations on technology and history. Not only does Benjamin illuminate Whitman’s use of photography, but the critic and the poet share similar commitments to the intentional conflation of certain philosophical dichotomies—contemplation versus experience, individuality versus collectivity, and freedom versus necessity. I want to examine how in Whitman’s poetry these familiar pairings are implicated in the sometimes overlooked ambiguity that almost always governs our encounter with a work of literary art: reading with the eye versus listening with the ear.

Franklin H. Durrah, John William De Forest, and the Varieties of Military Experience

Abstract: I late july 1865, ‘harper’s weekly’ announced an open call for essay submissions from veterans of the recent war. The soldiers’ first-hand accounts of wartime experience were to be the materials for “Left-Handed Penmanship,” a writing competition thought up by William Oland Bourne. Himself a New Yorker of moderate literary note, Bourne began publishing a short monthly newspaper in the last years of the war while serving as chaplain of Central Park Hospital.1 “Left-Handed Penmanship” was advertised in that paper, The Soldier’s Friend, as well as in Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and several regional newspapers in the Northeast and Midwest.2 And though he was himself no soldier, Bourne was “always devising some fresh pleasure or benefit for the soldiers,” and sought to award five hundred dollars to “the best four specimens of penmanship by ‘left-armed soldiers of the Union.’” The phrasing was vague and crude, but then so