Grandt: Shaping Words to Fit the Soul

Shaping Words to Fit the Soul

The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism

Jürgen E. Grandt

Taking up where he left off with Kinds of Blue (The Ohio State University Press, 2004), Jürgen E. Grandt seeks to explore in depth some of the implications of the modernist jazz aesthetic resonating in the African American literary tradition. Grandt’s new book, Shaping Words to Fit the Soul: The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism, probes the ways in which modernism’s key themes of fragmentation, alienation, and epistemology complicate the mapping of the American South as an “authenticating” locus of African American narrative. Rather than being a site of authentication, the South constitutes a symbolic territory that actually resists the very narrative strategies deployed to capture it.

The figurative ritual grounds traversed in texts by Frederick Douglass, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Tayari Jones reveal Afro-modernism as modernism with a historical conscience. Since literary Afro-modernism recurrently points to music as a symbolic territory of liberatory potential, this study also visits a variety of soundscapes, from the sorrow songs of the slaves to the hip-hop of the Dirty South, and from the blues of W. C. Handy to the southern rock of the Allman Brothers Band.

Afro-modernism as modernism with a historical conscience thus suggests a reconfiguration of southern ritual grounds as situated in time and mind rather than time and place, and the ramifications of this process extend far above and beyond the Mason-Dixon Line.

Berthold: American Risorgimento

American Risorgimento

Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy

Dennis Berthold

Although Herman Melville is typically considered one of America’s earliest cosmopolitan writers, scholarship has focused primarily on his involvement with the South Seas, England, and the Holy Land. In American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy, Dennis Berthold extends Melville’s transnational vision both geographically and historically by examining his many references to Italy and Rome in the context of the Risorgimento, Italy’s long quest for independence and political unity.

Melville’s contemporaries, notably Margaret Fuller and Henry T. Tuckerman, recognized the similarities between the Risorgimento and America’s struggle for national identity, and the influx of exiles from the failed Italian revolutions of 1820 and 1831 made Melville’s New York a hotbed of Risorgimento sympathies. Literary and political expostulations on Italy’s plight combined to create a distinctively American view of the Risorgimento that Melville elaborated in his fiction through allusions, characterizations, and direct commentary on Roman history, Dante, Machiavelli, Pope Pius IX, and Giuseppe Mazzini.

Melville followed the unfolding drama of Italian nationalism more closely than any other major American writer and found in it tropes and themes that fueled his turn to poetry, particularly after his visit to Italy in 1857. The Civil War, a crisis for American nationalism as urgent and profound as the Risorgimento, reinforced the symbolic parallels between the United States and Italy and led Melville to meditate on Giuseppe Garibaldi and other Italian patriots in one of his longest poems.

Melville’s literary appropriations of Italian history, art, and politics demonstrate that transnational cultural exchanges are not confined to later American writing but originate with the country’s earliest authors and their recognition that any national literature worthy of the name must incorporate a broad international frame of reference.

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Wayson: American Husband

American Husband

Kary Wayson

Life is a mystery, a puzzle, “a house of inscrutable signals,” leaving us “often stranded in the middle of a feeling.” With exquisite manipulation of language, the poems in this collection seek to unravel the mystery and solve the puzzle by parsing everyday experiences—observing life while lying about on the couch, on the floor, in bed and out—and everyday relationships—between the self and the mother, the self and the father, the self and the lover, the self and the self, and the self and god. English, “the telephone and the telephone book and the table with one vase and the cut rose,” is the means through which Wayson, drawing not only on her own wisdom but also on that of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Shajahana, Mother Goose, Federico Garcia Lorca, Edward Gorey, and others, enacts intersections between self and meaning. At each intersection, love’s loneliness forms and dissolves, expands and contracts, and then passes much like weather, or the mysterious changeable relationship between silence and words. Wayson may feel that she lives “with a desk where nothing gets done,” but with every poem she finds “some nook or cranny to plumb, some crook or nanny dumb enough to tell them what,” and another puzzle piece falls in place.

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O’Hara: Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading

Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading

Daniel T. O’Hara

The forces of globalization have transformed literary studies in America, and not for the better. The detailed critical reading of artistic texts has been replaced by newly minted catchphrases describing widely divergent snippets and anecdotes—deemed mere documents—regardless of the critic’s expertise in the appropriate languages and cultures. Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading by Daniel T. O’Hara traces the origin of this global approach to Emerson. But it also demonstrates another, tragic tradition of vision from Henry James that counters the Emersonian global imagination with the hard realities of being human. Building on this tradition, on Lacan’s insights into the real, and on Badiou’s original theory of truth, O’Hara points to how we can, and should, reground literary study in critical reading.

In Emerson’s classic essay “Experience” (1844), America appears in and as a symptom of the critic’s self-making that sacrifices the power of love to this visionary project—a literary version of the American self-made man. O’Hara rescues critical reading using James’s late work, especially The Golden Bowl (1904), and builds on this vision with examinations of texts by St. Paul, Emerson, Wallace Stevens, James Purdy, John Cheever, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, and others.

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Morgan: Narrative Means, Lyric Ends

Narrative Means, Lyric Ends

Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem

Monique R. Morgan

How did nineteenth-century poets negotiate the complex interplay between two seemingly antithetical modes—lyric and narrative? Narrative Means, Lyric Ends examines the solutions offered by four canonical long poems: William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Monique Morgan argues that each of these texts uses narrative techniques to create lyrical effects, effects that manipulate readers’ experience of time and shape their intellectual, emotional, and ethical responses. To highlight the productive tension between the modes, Morgan defines narrative as essentially temporal and sequential, and lyric as creating an illusion of simultaneity. The poems reinforce their larger narrative strategies, she suggests, with their figurative language.

Through her readings of these texts, Morgan questions lyric’s brevity and a-sociability, interrogates retrospection’s importance for narrative, examines the gendered implications of several genres, and determines the dramatic monologue’s temporal structure. Narrative Means, Lyric Ends offers four case studies of the interactions between broad modes and among specific genres, changes our aesthetic and ideological assumptions about lyric and narrative, expands the domain of narratology, and advocates a renewed formalism.

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Watters, Hoggarth, and Stansbery: The Freshwater Mussels of Ohio

The Freshwater Mussels of Ohio

G. Thomas Watters, Michael A. Hoggarth, and David H. Stansbery

Nearly 200 years ago, a naturalist named Rafinesque stood on the banks of the Ohio River and began to describe the freshwater mussels he found there. Since that time these animals have become the most imperiled animals in North America. Dozens of species have become extinct, and it is estimated that two-thirds of the remaining freshwater mussels face a similar fate. Yet, despite their importance, the mussels of Ohio remain a poorly documented and largely mysterious fauna.

The Freshwater Mussels of Ohio by G. Thomas Watters, Michael A. Hoggarth, and David H. Stansbery brings together, for the first time, the most up-to-date research on Ohio’s mussels. Designed for the weekend naturalist and scientist alike, it synthesizes recent work on genetics, biology, and systematics into one book. Each species is illustrated to a degree not found in any other work. Full-page color plates depict shell variation, hinge detail, and beak sculpture. Full-page maps show the distribution of each species based upon the collections of numerous museums (with historical distributions dating from the 1800s). In addition to species accounts, the book has a substantive introduction that includes information on basic biology, human use, and conservation issues. Extensive synonymies, a key to all species, and an illustrated glossary are included as well.

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Boyer: Fallout

Fallout

A Historian Reflects on America's Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons

Paul Boyer

The “fallout” from the nuclear arms race with its atmospheric tests, civil defense drills, superpower confrontations, and ever-present specter of mass annihilation was not limited to strontium-90 and other deadly substances: it also includes the mental and imaginative world of an entire generation, adults and children alike. It produced not only nightmares, worried conversations, and activist campaigns but also a diverse array of cultural artifacts, ranging from poems, novels, and paintings to popular songs, slang, movies, advertisements, radio shows, and TV specials. Without understanding this larger impact of the nuclear reality, large swaths of American thought and culture in the half century after 1945 become opaque and incomprehensible.

The essays range widely, from a discussion of the shattering impact of the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a warweary nation in 1945 to ruminations on the 1995 Enola Gay controversy, when a proposed fiftieth-anniversary commemorative exhibit of the atomic bombing of Japan at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History generated bitter controversy.

The book makes clear that even though the Cold War and the superpower nuclear arms race have ended, images of nuclear menace, and troubled memories of the atomic past, continue to stir uneasily in the American consciousness and to provide a fertile theme for mass culture productions, from video games to Hollywood films to best-selling thrillers. Fallout offers a fresh, readable, and timely look at a central shaping force in American culture over the past half century.

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