Utopias of One Kotin, Joshua
2017, 2017., 20171128, 2017-11-28
eBook
Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular-and thus exclusive and inimitable.
Utopias of Oneis a major new account of ...utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers-Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne-construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds-for themselves alone.
Utopias of Onemakes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.
What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? This introduction addresses this question by discussing the eight articles collected ...in the special cluster, “The World of Shakespeare and Company,” co-published by the Journal of Cultural Analytics and Modernism/modernity . All eight articles use data from the Shakespeare and Company Project to develop new accounts of modernism, the sociology of reading, and historical archives. Combining qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods, the articles open new paths for studying one of the most important institutions in literary history.
A Counterfactual Canon Karmanov, Fedor; Kotin, Joshua
Journal of Cultural Analytics,
5/2024, Volume:
9, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The article analyzes the relationship between gender and taste at Shakespeare and Company. Using the Shakespeare and Company Project datasets, we discover that the majority of the books in the ...lending library were by men, and that women were almost twice as likely as men to borrow books by women. We also discover that the female authors with a high ratio of male to female readers are now canonical: Agatha Christie, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore. In contrast, the female authors with the highest ratio of female to male readers are less well-known: Margaret Kennedy, E. M. Delafield, Rebecca West, Elizabeth von Arnim. These final two discoveries are surprising: they suggest that the reading practices of men determined the canon of female authors, and that the reading practices of women might reveal a counterfactual canon of modernism. We consider how this counterfactual canon of female authors might influence future work in literary history.
This article describes three data sets from the Shakespeare and Company Project. The data sets provide information about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in ...interwar Paris. The first data set focuses on the members of the lending library. The second, on the books that circulated in the lending library. The third, on the events—borrows, purchases, subscriptions, renewals, deposits, reimbursements—that connected members and books. Together, the three data sets promise to address and bridge concerns in modernist studies, the digital humanities, and the public humanities. Work on the data sets began in 2014. The first two versions of the data sets were released in 2020 and 2021, respectively. The current version, 1.2, was released in 2022. Over forty people have contributed to the data sets.
Archives of Rejection Kotin, Joshua
American literary history,
02/2024, Volume:
36, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
What can we learn about unpublished literature—and literature as such—by studying rejected literature? Each of the article’s four sections connects an archival document or set of documents ...to a topic in literary history and theory. In the first, a ledger tracking submissions to Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1882 leads to a discussion about recovery projects. In the second, a century of Houghton Mifflin reader reports leads to a discussion about evaluation. In the third, a novel submitted to Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company in 1930 leads to a discussion about historical counterfactuals. In the fourth, correspondence from the archives of Amiri Baraka and his agent, Ronald Hobbs, from the 1970s leads to a discussion about taste. Together, these sections introduce a resource and exemplify a method: how attention to small, practical decisions can illuminate large, abstract processes.By attending to editorial debates about poetry, we can understand what artistic value meant to specific people in specific contexts—and thus what it might mean in general. Poetry, in other words, promises to illuminate what’s literary about literary history.
Abstract
The Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) opened in Harlem in May 1965 and closed less than a year later. During that year, it became a center for arts and activism, a target of ...government surveillance and infiltration, and a symbol in a national controversy about government spending and accountability, and Black nationalism and civil disobedience. Today, BARTS is recognized as the inspiration for the Black Arts Movement. This article presents a history of BARTS by detailing how it was funded. The article also intervenes in debates about government sponsorship of the arts, and complicity and cooption.Did federal funding lead to the destruction of BARTS? If so, was there any alternative?
Kotin discusses The Pound Era of Hugh Kenner. The book is not about modernism. The Pound Era is important because of the account of poetry, the close readings, and the commitment to definition, ...distinction, explanation. Holding up The Pound Era as a model for critics is like holding up Ulysses as a model for novelists. The book is too virtuosic, too idiosyncratic--too good.
Wallace Stevens's Point of View KOTIN, JOSHUA
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
01/2015, Volume:
130, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
"The earth, for us, is flat and bare. /. . . Poetry // Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns. . . ." Such claims saturate Wallace Stevens's work: poetry, Stevens affirms ...and reaffirms, is a potential source of value in a secular world. This essay tracks his attempts to realize this potential—to write a poem that would satisfy his metaphysical need. His work is relentlessly self-critical and experimental, and over his career he develops extravagant (and ultimately hermetic) responses to a stubborn philosophical problem. My aim is to reframe critical approaches to a central topic in Stevens's poetry and to reevaluate his relation to philosophy. In the process, I hope to suggest answers to more general questions: What is experimental poetry? How do poets think in verse? Why do poets write difficult poems? What makes a poem difficult in the first place?
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