This comprehensive and authoritative collection of Oscar Wilde's American interviews affords readers a fresh look at the making of a literary legend. Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a ...serious writer (at twenty-six years old, he had by then published just one volume of poems), Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts that was organized to publicize a touring opera, Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, which lampooned him and satirized the Aesthetic movement he had been imported to represent. In this year-long series of broadly distributed and eagerly read newspaper interviews, Wilde excelled as a master of self-promotion. He visited major cities from New York to San Francisco but also small railroad towns along the way, granting interviews to newspapers wherever asked. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and reporters noted that he was dressed for the part. He wooed and flattered his hosts everywhere, pronouncing Miss Alsatia Allen of Montgomery, Alabama, the most beautiful young lady he had seen in the United States, adding, This is a remark, my dear fellow, I supposed I have made of some lady in every city I have visited in this country. It could be appropriately made. American women are very beautiful. Confronted at every turn by an insatiable audience of sometimes hostile interviewers, the young poet tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. Seeing America and Americans for the first time, Wilde's perception often proved as sharp as his wit; the echoes of both resound in much of his later writings. His interviewers also succeeded in getting him to talk about many other topics, from his opinions of British and American writers (he thought Poe was America's greatest poet) to his views of Mormonism. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.
If every American poet knew Paul Celan's work in the 1960s, that is because Jerome Rothenberg's City Lights Pocket Poets anthology, New Young German Poets, had effectively inaugurated Celan as the ...Poet of the Holocaust in 1959. 5 This designation was based on Celan's first and best-known poem, "Todesfuge" "A Death Fugue", which Jack Hirschman, for example, called "obviously the finest and most authentic encounter with the experience of Nazified Europe." 6 Virtually everyone agreed. Moreover, as America's political poets turned their collective attention to the conflict in Vietnam, many of them began to aspire, in different ways, to a similar sense of authenticity. A perverse result of that critical consensus and the aspiration it engendered, however, is that "Todesfuge" soon became more important as testimony than as a text that discovers a fresh mode of experience or a new way of knowing. Troubling Celan acutely and provoking much of his suspicion toward readers and translators, this objectification of his work was ultimately the cost of recognition as the Poet of the Holocaust. And increased circulation amplified its effect. Unlike the two previously published translations of "Todesfuge" alone, the Rothenberg anthology 7 reached a broad audience: the initial 2,500 copies were sold quickly at $1 each, and a second edition was soon printed and sold at the same price. Not only did W. S. Merwin know this anthology soon after it was published, but he also recalled having encountered Celan's work (in French translation) prior to writing the political poems included in The Lice. 8 The eight poems in the City Lights anthology represent work from Celan's first three volumes, Mohn und Gedachtnis (1952), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955), and Sprachgitter (1959). Of these eight, "Todesfuge," in conjunction with "Abend der Worte" "Night of the Word" and "Schibboleth" "Shibboleth", best elaborate Celan's impact on the style of Merwin's protest poems in The Lice, including "Whenever I Go There" and "The Asians Dying." Before turning to Merwin, however, a closer look at Celan's early style will help make its impact -- and its significance -- much clearer. Beyond the abundance of Celanesque ciphers in the poem, the capitalization of "Death" in the phrase "Death their star" (l. 21) is the only formal marker present, indicating, as in "Todesfuge," an allegorization of Death incarnate. But here that Death is depicted as a star that can be followed "everywhere" rather than a "gang-boss" or master limited to "Deutschland." Moreover, like the dual flags of oppression and memory in "Schibboleth," this star provides a means of ideological as well as physical orientation. Yet Merwin's description of the "possessors" as simultaneously dispossessed and incorporeal under "Death their star" paradoxically threatens to write them out of the present (tense) altogether. As they "advance into the shadows," generating "no light," they are depicted as being without memory, promise, "past," or "future" (ll. 22, 23, 24, 25). Even their spiritual existence is liminal, more tenuous than the physical existence of the "ghosts of the villages that trail in the sky/ Making a new twilight" (ll. 8-9). This representation cannot but recall the Jewish victims who had been obliterated in the Nazis' "final solution."
This chapter explains what exactly are the twenty‐first century critics of modernist poetry searching for. The key ways of imagining the adjustment away from a depth model for twenty‐first century ...scholars of modernist poetry in particular fall under the rubric of New Formalist approaches to reading, whether the purpose of any specific critique may be to elucidate issues of history, politics, culture, or the aesthetic. The methods highlighted here are meant to explain and elaborate on what Marjorie Levinson has called “activist” and “normative” formalisms. These may be best exemplified for modernist poetry criticism by interpretive practices that include “literal” reading, “differential” reading, “radical” reading, and “distant” reading. The chapter addresses an assortment of tactics for reading modernist poems an array of strategies for making sense of those poems.
“Murdered from a Distance” addresses poets who strove to effect utopian political change through violent representation. In it I argue that Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and Mina Loy each intervened ...in democratic politics in formerly unrecognized ways, and that associating their experimentation with elitist disengagement or ideological extremism distorts our view twentieth-century literature and culture. Informed by archival research and interdisciplinary analysis, this thesis is motivated by two related questions about modernity: the first asks why such diverse artists chose, between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression, to reconfigure their art in order to assault their perceived enemies or rivals; the second asks how their strategies produced memorable art. Its theoretical component elucidates the social power of lyric and the status of marginalized subjects in public opinion: Pound sought to condemn the iniquitous members of society in the minds of his readers; Hughes championed a vision of color that conformed to the contours of actually-existing democracy; and Loy promoted an egalitarian form of “psycho-democracy,” particularly in regard to women in the intimate sphere. While statesmen attracted adherents to orthodoxy through eloquent rhetoric, polemicists attempted to spark resistance to it via aesthetic violence. Rapid technological and cultural developments exposed modern subjects to aesthetic violence in ways that postmodern ones, inured by constant exposure, no longer are. Elision, condensation, juxtaposition, riddling, and musicality then compounded the damage that prosaic modes of assault (libel, obscenity, and hate speech) have been widely acknowledged to do. Thus, as the modern public sphere was disintegrating, the discursive arts remained more persuasive, more rational, than poetry—yet poems suddenly proved capable of generating more pain. Formally, polemical poetry was restricted only by limits on its makers' ability to imagine agonistic styles that could circulate unimpeded, and neither social censure nor evolving legal statutes delayed it or dulled its edge. Yet threats of retribution and censorship ultimately made demands on poets too. These risks continually refined the ways in which polemicists materially and legally, as well as etymologically (i.e., πóλ μoς), waged war with words.
The poet's lifelong struggle against lynching culture is the focus of Jason Miller's "Langston's Hughes's 'The Bitter River.'" In an argument that emphasizes post-WWII U.S. culture, Miller's ...meditation on a national trauma offers a historically detailed perspective on the painful relationship between the regular failure of anti-lynching legislature and the related failure of democracy for black soldiers and patriots at home. An extended and thoughtful interpretation of the long poem "The Bitter River" repositions that text near the center of Hughes's later political writing while making claims for its excellence as literary art. John Lowney's "Langston Hughes's Cold War Audiences" proposes a revisionist account of Hughes's engagements with the political left within the framework of internationalist cultural production. ...since Hughes eventually proved too radical even for the New Deal venue Common Ground (which had welcomed many Popular Front writers), his writings on race and class relations in the U.S. became of necessity increasingly international, which in turn fostered his desire to develop new modes and avenues of intercultural dialogue.
Pea (Pisum sativum) is one of relatively few genetically amenable plant species with compound leaves. Pea leaves have a variety of specialized organs: leaflets, tendrils, pulvini and stipules, which ...enable the identification of mutations that transform or affect distinct parts of the leaf. Characterization of these mutations offers insights into the development and evolution of novel leaf traits. The previously characterized morphological gene Cochleata, conferring stipule identity, was known to interact with Stipules reduced (St), which conditions stipule size in pea, but the St gene remained unknown.
Here we analysed Fast Neutron irradiated pea mutants by restriction site associated DNA sequencing.
We identified St as a gene encoding a C2H2 zinc finger transcription factor that is regulated by Cochleata. St regulates both cell division and cell expansion in the stipule.
Our approach shows how systematic genome-wide screens can be used successfully for the analysis of traits in species for which whole genome sequences are not available.
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