If underestimation of the midcentury persists in twentieth century literary scholarship, then that underestimation has been licensed in part by the powerful hold of modernism and postmodernism as heuristic and period frames for...
The great danger for the young American writer is impatience. A wise uncle would advise him thus: "Publish nothing before you are thirty but study, absorb, experiment. Take at least three years over every book. Be very careful...
COLLAGE (Fr coller, to glue) Refers to an abstract visual artwork in which the artist juxtaposes disparate media and various textures, affixing them to a single pictorial surface. Collage entered the descriptive vocabulary...
The people shall not be prevented from enjoying any of the fundamental human rights. These fundamental human rights guaranteed to the people by this Constitution shall be conferred upon the people of this and future generations...
Frank O’Hara is a touchstone poet of the post–World War II period. We know him as an exemplary New York poet, cold war poet, queer poet, and postmodern poet. We love O’Hara, too: he’s chatty and arty, casual and funny,...
Series II of the Elizabeth Bishop Papers at Vassar College houses the poet’s “Professional Correspondence, Contracts, and Financial Statements.” What is one to make of this series? More to the point: Why would one make anything...
How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings...
Until very recently, literature in English of the late 1940s suffered from a strange critical underestimation. In contrast to the patent world-historical and geopolitical import of the years just after World War II, the...
Describes a work of art that imitates the style, gestures, or forms of an older work or antique model. As a formal descriptor of literary works, the word pastiche dates back centuries; as an evaluative term, its usage...
This essay brings the discourse of “weak theory” to bear on Lyn Hejinian’s feminist experimental poem of the 1980s, My Life. It argues that the eating matters of My Life—the poem’s steady references to eating, cooking,...
