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Poet Bonny Finberg's textual images collages in Dadaist sensibility by New Media Artist Barbara Rosenthal.
A new volume in the distinguished annual that presents the latest and best Yeats criticism
One should never assume that the narrator in a poem is expressing views identical to the author’s. “For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within,” wrote Tennyson. Autobiographical elements tend to be so mixed in with the fictional that lines blur. Bazyn’s revolving carousel of poetic “I’s” includes an egotist who makes fun of his arrogance; a baby confused by his wobbly surroundings; the simple joys of a childhood Christmas; youth’s dilemma at forging a vocation; the peculiar circumstances surrounding one’s first love; reminiscences of a recent class reunion; a period of self-examination following the death of a neighbor; anxiously awaiting a monog...
Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn--Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through an astonishing range of characters and events, Cosmopolitans illuminates many aspects of Jewish life in the area: the high profile of Jewish women, extraordinary achievements in the business world, the cultural creativity of the second generation, the bitter debate about the proper response to the Holocaust and Zionism, and much more. Focusing in rich detail on the first hundred years after the Gold Rush, the book also takes the story up to the present day, demonstrating how unusually strong affinities for the arts and for the struggle for social justice have characterized this community even as it has changed over time. Cosmopolitans, set in the uncommonly diverse Bay Area, is a truly unique chapter of the Jewish experience in America.
How one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the United States continues to haunt the nation’s racial psyche In 1931, nine black youths were charged with raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite meager and contradictory evidence, all nine were found guilty and eight of the defendants were sentenced to death—making Scottsboro one of the worst travesties of justice to take place in the post-Reconstruction South. Remembering Scottsboro explores how this case has embedded itself into the fabric of American memory and become a lens for perceptions of race, class, sexual politics, and justice. James Miller draws upon the archives of the Communist International and NAACP, co...
Performing Blackness offers a challenging interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston offers an exciting meditation on modern black performance's role in realising African-American aspirations for autonomy and authority. Artists covered include: * John Coltrane * Ntozake Shange * Ed Bullins * Amiri Baraka * Adrienne Kennedy * Michael Harper. Performing Blackness is an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate about the vitality and importance of black culture.
In “When Malindy Sings” the great African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar writes about the power of African American music, the “notes to make the sound come right.” In this book T. J. Anderson III, son of the brilliant composer, Thomas Anderson Jr., asserts that jazz became in the twentieth century not only a way of revising old musical forms, such as the spiritual and work song, but also a way of examining the African American social and cultural experience. He traces the growing history of jazz poetry and examines the work of four innovative and critically acclaimed African American poets whose work is informed by a jazz aesthetic: Stephen Jonas (1925?–1970) and the unjustly ...
In this robust collection Crystal Bacon explores vision and the nature of myth-making, from cultural archetypes, such as Persephone and Narcissus, to Anne Frank and Chet Baker, to the personal myths that shape individual lives. Additionally, these poems, written from Bacon's perspective and adopted personas, examine the timeless themes of birth and death, love and loss, maleness and femaleness. As a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation poet, Crystal Bacon led writing seminars for high school teachers in southern New Jersey. Her work has appeared in publications in the US and Canada as well as the anthology, Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City. A professor at Gloucester County College, she divides her time between New Jersey and Nova Scotia.
This accessible, personal, and provocative study returns to the major subject in literary discussion before and during the relatively recent flourishing of literary theory, that of literary intention. Does the author’s personal intention or historical site determine a correct interpretation of a literary work? Probing the entire range of issues connected with this many-faceted and knotty concept, this book engages with interpretation on both theoretical and practical levels. It argues that the hard questions about interpretation connected to issues of intention cannot be sidestepped or ignored. It does not argue for conservative concepts of literature itself, nor against the major historical engagements of critics in our time. But in addressing those who continue to read or teach literature, it does insist on a level of sophistication in issues of literary interpretation that cannot be assured by historical research and knowledge of the social and cultural connections to literary works. The overall aim of the work is to recall readers to the great complexity, pleasure, and interest of literary interpretation.