AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

• Invisible AudiencesThe Pathos of Vision in Charles Altieri's Late Poetics
• Daniel T. O'Hara (bio)

Literature, Education, and Society: Bridging the Gap (2023) is the latest book by Charles Altieri. Altieri is the author of many important books that combine critical theory, modernist poetry, and often modern painting. Of these books, I think his very best are Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning (1981), Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (1989), and The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (2003). What ties his books together is his overarching thesis that European phenomenology and Anglo-American philosophy, working together, can illuminate the continuing contemporaneity of modernism and what once upon a time was called postmodernism. That is, modernity's most characteristic arts of poetry and painting, from the Renaissance to the present moment, continue to dominate the imagination of the age, whatever name it carries. The subtitle of this new book, "Bridging the Gap," pretty much explains Altieri's approach throughout his career.

I admire this approach, and have been pursuing it from the beginning of my own career when I first met Altieri at a "Defining Modernism" session of the MLA in the mid-1970s. These session spanned a number of years and were primarily proposed and moderated by William V. Spanos, a founding editor of boundary 2, a journal devoted to distinguishing postmodernism as Spanos understood it from modernism, a big issue at the time, even before Lyotard's work on postmodernism made its way into the American context. On this session's panel, Marjorie Perloff was speaking about William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say." I noticed that Charlie, as those who knew him called him, was scribbling furiously, as Perloff spoke, as he sat next to her on the panel. A few years later, his counter-reading of the poem appeared in print, demonstrating literally the idea of critical conversation. For me, Charlie has always been a leader in the furthering of that conversation. So, too, this new book proposes a poetics that indeed seeks to bridge the gaps, [End Page 169] some would now say the abysses, separating the institution of literature and literary study, higher education, and American society, despite the overlaps among them.

A hallmark of Altieri's poetics, throughout his career, has been Wallace Stevens's "Of Modern Poetry" (1942), and halfway into this short book it shows up again. Before discussing his use of the poem here, his reading of it, I want to highlight a portion of this famous poetry about poetry manifesto for my own purposes. Stevens argues at the heart of the poem that modern poetry, to be such,

• Debts
• Dan-el Padilla Peralta (bio)

Only way he comin' back is through his unborns

—Lil Wayne, "Uproar" (2018)

Recently I've been spending some time in the intellectual company of longtermists, not because I find their arguments persuasive but because they seem to have stumbled upon an effective rhetorical strategy. As I understand it, their move is to direct attention away from the muddy moral universe of the present to that final frontier of the far-off future, so invitingly fraught in the glistening promise of its unknowability. And there's no denying the strategy's success: books here, media coverage there, stacks of funding everywhere. Yet the more I read the longtermists, the more they seem like twenty-first-century versions of Augustine of Hippo, their heavenly city populated by blissed-out distant generations. But I'm convinced, too, that, much like Augustine's, their fixation on the future contains an important message about the valuation of the past. It's a message about valuation and struggle.

I use the word valuation carefully. I want to think about value. The longtermists would have us assign the greatest value to the lives of future generations, indeed of future selves: vast, in fact potentially unknowably vast, in their quantity, and therefore exerting obligations on us by the sheer force of their number. But I submit that the greatest obligations we have are not to selves in the future whom (with the exception of our children, grandchildren, and, if we're lucky, great-grandchildren) we won't ever know, but to the selves of the past whom we can, at least in principle, come to know. Not in the fullness of their personal interiority, of course; even the recently dead are shadowy, and those dead for many years or decades or centuries or millennia much more so. But because they existed, we can come to know them, and cultivate relationships with them, in ways precluded by the still-not-existence of the unborn. And the mere prospect of those relationships creates ethical demands. The realization of those demands comes down, ultimately, to the business of value, and to the necessity of struggle. [End Page 64]

The field that has come to be known as Classics is all about value. That much is apparent from its very name. If we are not to disavow that name (and I think there are good reasons for doing just that), then we need to think harder about the demands and merits of struggling for value in a way that simultaneously honors our obligation to this confounded and confounding world, and to the pasts—and past people—who brought this world into being. My belief is that this struggle must be reparative: not only must it directly confront the ill-gotten gains of racial capitalism, it must a

• Unlearning Limits
• Brooke Holmes (bio)

The nature of the classical is to give the impression of immunity to time. In practice, what is most certain is its endless rethinking. If the classical is unstable, so much more so is that thing we call Classics. For professional classicists, this last point unsettles at a moment when the future of the field is so precarious within a broader crisis of the humanities. The risk of rethinking Classics is often posed as the loss of the academic study of ancient Greece and Rome. But doubling down on the status quo undoubtedly puts the study of the ancient Mediterranean in as much danger as demands for radical change, especially if complacency becomes the modus operandi of well-resourced institutions like my own. In any event, swinging between inertia and millenarianism uses up energy better spent on organizing and sustaining new communities inside and outside universities convened around a shared attention to an ancient past, as in fact so many scholar-activists—in many cases from marginalized positions that bring heightened risk to speaking out—have been doing.

By reframing the object of attention in the expanded terms of an ancient past, we confront one of the most pressing issues for disciplinary reimagination: What are the boundaries of the ancient world? And how do these boundaries determine its study? It's hardly a radical claim, at least in essays of this genre, to declare that these boundaries extend far beyond Greece and Rome in their most "classical" periods (fifth- and fourth-century bce Athens; Rome of the first centuries bce and ce). The study of the once maligned periods of Hellenistic and late antiquity has flourished for decades. Ancient history has been adroitly navigating between the micro-scale of local community and much broader research zones organized by comparison and contact. The rapid rise of classical reception studies, focused on how ancient texts and artifacts have been read and reread across time and space, has redefined the temporal boundaries of the field so that they exceed "antiquity" altogether. Increasingly, those trained as classicists are not only reading but also writing histories of modern classicism as defined by the narrowed nineteenth- and twentieth-century valuation of ancient Greece and Rome and the formation [End Page 24] of Classics as an academic field in Europe and the US through processes imbricated in biopolitical racism, empire, nationalism, and fascism.

These critical histories of the discipline have helped expand its boundaries and clarified the urgency of centering receptions of ancient Greece and Rome by all of those who have had classical humanism weaponized against their sovereignty, their flourishing, and their comm

• The "Priceless Risk" of J. Drew LanhamPoet Laureate of Edgefield County, South Carolina
• Renee H. Shea

With a history that spans centuries, the role of a poet laureate has gained enormous popularity and influence in the twenty-first century. In the United States, what began as a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1937 has proliferated into a full-fledged national program. Today, poet laureates representing states, regions, big cities, and small towns join with youth laureates to build and bring community through print, spoken word, music, and performance. This conversation with Joseph Drew Lanham is the first of a series—"The Laureates"—that will engage current and past poet laureates who are spreading the word in diverse settings, each in their distinctive ways, though always starting with their own poems and vision.

The poet laureate of Edgefield County, a small county in South Carolina, where he grew up, Lanham is recognized nationally as a writer, environmentalist, and ornithologist. A University Distinguished Alumni Professor of Wildlife Ecology and a Master Teacher in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation at Clemson University, he has been honored with numerous grants and awards; in 2022 he received a MacArthur "Genius Grant." He is the author of a memoir titled The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature (2016) and of Sparrow Envy (2017), a poetry collection. Forthcoming books include Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves and Range Maps: Birds, Blackness, and Loving Nature between the Two.

Lanham seeks to bring the historical past into the present as he explores connections between the natural world and social justice with a special focus on David Drake, an enslaved man living in the 1800s, known for his exceptional pottery that today is highly coveted by museums and collectors. Lanham's study reflects his belief that, as he writes, "I cannot tell stories of birds and of the cypress swamps and old rice fields I frequent in low-country [End Page 142] South Carolina without telling the story of those who moved forests, soil, and water through force and greed. There are stories in the soil that have to be plowed up" ("Forever Gone," Orion Magazine, 21 February 2018). As poet laureate, he continues to unearth those stories, often transforming them into poems and inspiring others to do the same.

(The following conversation occurred via Zoom and email in March 2023.)

renee h. shea:

In the opening of The Home Place you write: "I am a man in love with nature. I am an eco-addict . . . a wildling . . . an ornithologist, wildlife ecologist, and college professor . .

• On the Salernitan Questions
• Anthony Madrid (bio)

The backstory is charming. A book collector buys a Renaissance manuscript codex. He finds in it, amid piles of unrelated material, a transcript of a bizarre Latin poem, about three quarters of which is nothing but a rigmarole of questions. "Why do tidings of disgrace cure hiccups?" "Why do women have irrational pregnancy cravings?" "Why are puppies born blind, and then, exactly nine days later, they can see?" One hundred and thirty lines of this.

Our scholar does some research and locates the source text of the transcript, and the source text of the source text, and the source text of that, and so on, until he winds up a world expert on "Question" literature, aka "Problem" literature. It turns out there's this rich history.

The above, which sounds like something Borges would have made up, is real. I'm simplifying things, but it's all true. The collector's name was Brian Lawn. He died in 2001, age ninety-five or ninety-six. His first book, The Salernitan Questions (1963), was his attempt to introduce the reader to a genre he had come to love. The book is a chaste, scholarly edition of a text he calls the "Speculator Broadside," which is the immediate source text for the handwritten thing he had purchased, years before. And he doesn't just give you the Latin poem and the translation. He gives you the whole kit: "An Introduction to the History of Medieval and Renaissance Problem Literature."

I found out about The Salernitan Questions because I was amateur-researching a West African analogue to it. Let me give a choice specimen, originally delivered in Ewe, a language spoken mainly in Ghana:

"Hear a parable!" "May the parable come!" "One day an eagle swooped down upon the beautiful daughter of a chief and carried her to an island in the river. The chief looked for people to fetch his daughter away from the eagle. A thief, a hunter, and a mender came at once. The thief said he could steal the girl from the talons of the eagle. The hunter said that should the eagle see them and try to [End Page 75] recapture the girl, he would shoot him, so that he would die at once. The mender said that should the eagle (having been shot) fall into the boat and break it, he would patch it up.

"As soon as they had started off, the thief stole the girl. As they reached the middle of the river, the eagle came to take the child. Then the hunter shot him, so that he fell into the boat, which was shattered into a thousand pieces. The mender immediately patched the boat, so that they reached home safely. Which of these three people did the most, thereby gaining the praise of the chief?"

You have to understand: There is no "correct" answer to

• Images and the Discipline of the Classics
• Patrice D. Rankine (bio)

No one in the Global North alive in 2016 can forget the haunting image of the young boy with disheveled, dusty hair, his hollow stare into the camera as blood obscures half his face. The boy was five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, a Syrian caught in a Russian air strike on the al-Qatarji neighborhood of Aleppo during the Syrian Civil War. The picture had been staged, a gesture of grand significance, given the realities of mass media Guy Debord described long ago in The Society of Spectacle (1967). Anthropologist Rania Sweis (Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt [2021]) sets the viral image within a global obsession with humanitarian aid, which belies the paradoxes of the industry, the questions of who the recipients of such care are and whether these (mostly children) are getting the resources they truly need. Half a century earlier, the leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States seized upon the spectacular truth of images (worth thousands of words) in the promulgation of the 1955 photograph of Emmett Till's open casket, revealing a face so disfigured that anyone seeing it would have to consider the horrendous violence enacted upon Black people in America during segregated times and beyond.

Those committed to academic disciplines, in my case the Classics, can learn about relevance and impact from the ubiquity of these images. Within a society of spectacle, control of the image is a specialty, to whatever extent the Kim Kardashians of the world are self-conscious about the power they wield (although Kim undeniably is). The compulsion to compose and promulgate pictures propelled Darnella Frazier to fame in 2020. At seventeen years old, she captured the horrendous murder of George Floyd on her cellphone camera, an act that uncannily enclosed her trauma: the continuous recall of the event, and later, her recital at the 2021 trial of Floyd's murderer (former police officer Derek Chauvin) of what she saw the previous year. For the use of her cellphone camera as a craft, Frazier has received several commendations, including a Pulitzer special award in 2021, kudos somewhat countervailing to her grim experiences. Frazer's ubiquity is one lesson, and the personal impact of her tool is an even more intimate reminder of the purpose of a discipline. [End Page 42] Although there is little internet trace of Frazer after 2021, from her Instagram page, she loves photography, it brings her joy, and it provides a window from herself to the world, or a bridge "between the world and me," as James Baldwin might put it. As a tool, the camera has immediate relevance, and its control and deployment are meaningful from a variety of standpoints: evoking emotion, prompt

• InterventionsAn Interview with Cristina García
• Frederick Luis Aldama

Since Cristina García burst onto the global literary stage in 1992 with her critically acclaimed debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban, she emerged as a singular, significant force in the shaping of our contemporary world letters. Her many novels have been translated and published in numerous languages, reaching a wide international audience. Her diverse body of work encompasses not only celebrated poetry but also children's and young adult books as well as edited literary anthologies. Cristina's consequential creations introduce us to an array of vividly imagined characters that include extraordinary matriarchs, ex-guerilla activists, artists, magicians, and polyglot drag queens as well as bloodthirsty dictators and machista patriarchs.

Cristina possesses an immeasurable talent for vividly portraying a wide spectrum of human experiences and backgrounds. She also dares to powerfully pause, push open, and stretch wide our engagement with oft-cataclysmic moments in world history; great wars and revolutions work as the push-pull forces that scatter, re-root, and unite characters. Indeed, the power of Cristina's pen is precisely her ability to powerfully transport us through portals to grand historical events where we can sink our mind and bodies deeply into the minutiae of everyday sensations, feelings, actions, and interactions of her wondrous panoply of protagonists. Cristina's fiction, like that of other prodigious literary talents who wedge fiction into history, such as Luis Urrea, Sandra Cisneros, Rosario Castellanos, Reyna Grande, Reinaldo Arenas, Ruth Behar, Fernando del Paso, and Junot Díaz, wakes us to the bigness of world-altering events as they resonate in our daily interactions, reflections, sensations, and dispositions.

Cristina's achievements and accolades are legion. She has been nominated for the National Book Award and has received esteemed honors such as the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and the Whiting Writers' Award. Additionally, she has been granted prestigious [End Page 69] fellowships including the Guggenheim, NEA, and Princeton's Hodder Fellowship. Throughout Cristina's career, she has held notable positions at institutions such as UT Austin's Michener Center for Writers, the University of Miami, and as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University– San Marcos.

During the exciting launch of her whirlwind worldwide book tour of Vanishing Maps (2023), I had the great pleasure of learning from Cristina García.

Cristina, what drives you to write nonfiction, poetry, and fiction?