Ode to a Spring Uniform

O believe me if all of the flagrant bright blue,

Which to many an eye has brought hurt,

Were to fade in the wash to some delicate hue,

Both the blouse and the unplaited skirt.

Thou wouldst then be more fit for the pupils to wear,

Though thy advocates boost thee sky high,

For this loud awful color is more than we'll bear

If thy shade can be changed by a dye

In the summer of 1838, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, then the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, opened his public lectures on “Literature and Literary Life” by stating that he would be considering “Authors as Artists.” Asking that his auditors “Think not that thus I degrade the Poet's high vocation into a base handicraft,” Longfellow explained:

It was with no sarcastic meaning that the Icelanders of old called the Poet a Rhyme-Smith. He is God's workman; and amid the smoke and sparks about him, on his sound anvil forges the broad shield of Truth and weapons of her warfare.

Longfellow offered an analogy between poet and smith which hinged on conscious effort and on the service provided by the tangible products of that labor. Poems were “forged” objects, artifacts consciously produced by “God's workman.” Two years later, in autumn 1840, Longfellow composed “The Village Blacksmith”; the poem concluded:

Thus at the flaming forge of life

Our fortunes must be wrought;

Thus on its sounding anvil shaped

Each burning deed and thought.

By 1840, Longfellow no longer explicitly identified the poet's labor with the active work of the blacksmith. Having witnessed or imagined a blacksmith at work, Longfellow organized his impressions into “The Village Blacksmith,” which presented a particular interpretation of those perceptions – the moral of the poem – for the instruction of its readers. The analogy between the poet and smith turned only on the lesson that the fact of each man's labor could provide to others. The poet was no longer a Rhyme-Smith; instead, he was an instructor who created abstract moral imperatives rather than tangible products.

John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) is the embodiment of a “frontier” film; he himself has described it as “a story about borders” (West, “An Interview with John Sayles,” 14). The film's genre, its locale, its incorporation of history, ethnicity, generations, and sexual proscriptions, and even its use of pans to cut across time all cohere around this perspective. Nor, as I will indicate, is this concern with borders new to Sayles's art; Lone Star, which taps a number of motifs and conventions familiar to American culture, bringing together a multitude of meanings of boundaries and margins and frontiers, intensifies a theme that exists in every one of his films.

In November 2000, I was sitting in my study in Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish town just south of Tel Aviv, leafing through the latest issue of Critical Inquiry. This was a few weeks into the renewed outbreak of violence in Israel/Palestine, an outbreak that with a single stroke cancelled out the laboriously earned achievements of the Oslo peace accords, claimed the lives of thousands, and all but shattered the hopes of peace activists on both sides. Jaffa itself was transformed overnight, its delicate tissue of Jewish-Arab coexistence torn by Arab riots, Jewish vigilantes, and brutal police intervention. I was therefore looking forward to the momentary escape offered by the American journal that had just arrived in the mail.

In his diary in July 1946 Senator Claude Pepper of Florida noted that Great Britain was “showing considerable progress in [a] year under its socialist government – nationalization of [the] Bank of England, coal mines … . They have enacted [a] housing program and extended [the] social security system and a national health system. That is the direction of things everywhere but here.” The question of why American social democracy did not take off in the same way after World War Two as elsewhere in the industrialised world has become an important issue in recent American historiography. Indeed, the question of what was left, in both senses of the word, of “liberalism” after the death of Franklin Roosevelt assumes particular importance when one considers the fact that there were in the United States in 1946 a fair number of liberal political thinkers who were committed to using the New Deal and wartime experience as a launch pad for further left-of-centre political experimentation. Claude Pepper, Henry Wallace, Helen Douglas, Harold Ickes, Rexford Tugwell, Paul Douglas – all were in positions of political or intellectual influence at the end of the Second World War. Yet, by 1950, they would all experience either political defeat or a shift away from vocal commitment to social democratic values.

The American conservatives of the 1960s have arrived at last. Not in Washington, not in positions of power – they did that during the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s and the Republican Congresses of the 1990s. No, it is in history itself, the record of events, that the right is finally appearing. Now that the elephant has occupied the parlor, scholars are inquiring whence it came.

When the prophetic seer was asked whether this boy [Narcissus] would live to a ripe old age, he replied: ‘Yes, if he does not come to know himself.’

Unwittingly, he [Narcissus] desired himself, and was himself the object of his own approval, at once seeking and sought … But he could not lay hold upon himself … Poor foolish boy, why vainly grasp at the fleeting image that eludes you?

For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.

There is more than one specter haunting Paul Auster's Ghosts. The novel is, indeed, riddled with specters (puns intended): Auster, as writer, haunts a text where reader and critic alike hopelessly strive to catch an equally elusive meaning. I intend to show, in this paper, how Auster, following a lineage going back to the metafiction writers of the late 1960s, passing by others loosely grouped under the term “post-structuralists,” more importantly heralds a new era, and manages to present, in one novel, a full-fledged allegory of how postmodern writing and reading can successfully negotiate the new challenges presented by the dawning virtual age, focusing on the twin concepts of the mirror and the double and the resulting spectral image(s) produced.

The autobiographical Prologue to Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999) provides an intensely localized narrative cartography of a working-class, African American neighborhood in southwest Atlanta circa 1981. We witness the authorial figure “running down the streets of southwest Atlanta like a crazy woman” – running because “[a] cab can't jump the gully back of the fish joint and can't take the shortcut through the Laundromat lot.” Bambara does not detail these quotidian geographies just for the sake of it: her novel is immersed in the period (1979–81) when Atlanta's black community was both torn asunder and brought together by the disappearance and death of a number of local children. The Prologue's protagonist walks through the wooded lot because, in such secluded spaces, she might find evidence that will help to solve the Atlanta Child Murders: “You stub your toe on brown glass … you pry loose a crusty beer bottle … beneath the bottle is a rain-blurred Popsicle wrapper. Late summer, you figure, moving on.” The narrator runs frantically because she is supposed to collect her twelve-year-old child (apparently Bambara's own daughter, Karma) from school in a time and place when local youths are going missing, and being found murdered.

In her 1980 interview with Charles Bukowski, Italian journalist Fernanda Pivano posed what seemed at first an innocuous question: “Why are you called Charles in the books and Hank in your private life?”

Because of his work in the 1930s with tenant and labour organizations and his lyrical critique of the consequences of modern technological progress, George Oppen and his poetry have always been labelled as uniquely “moral” or “ethical” by his closest readers and critics. Poems such as The Materials (1962) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Of Being Numerous (1968) minimalistically present us with the social and material reality of markedly twentieth-century issues: urban experience, nuclear apocalypse, and the persistence of poverty amid wide-spread wealth, just to name a few. And this thematic concern with ethical issues has been one of the main impetuses behind many of the studies of Oppen's ethics.

Addressing the opening night rally of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) Convention on 31 August 1967, the executive director William F. Pepper informed the several thousand delegates that:

Historians may well count your presence here as the most significant gathering of Americans since the founding of our nation. Never before have so many Americans, from so many different living conditions, come from so many diverse sections of the land to dedicate themselves to the rebuilding, indeed to the reclamation of their government and their destinies.

Pepper concluded his remarks by declaring that “it may well be that what you begin here may ultimately result in a new social, economic and political system in the United States.” Outside the auditorium a bongo group was chanting “Kill Whitey.” The convention was one of the most ambitious attempts to forge a broad political alliance of antiwar organisations, New Left insurgents and the radical wing of the civil rights movement in 1960s America. It was planned by the NCNP, a co-ordinating organisation that hoped for a fundamental reconstitution of the American socio-economic and political order. Scholars have largely ignored the NCNP, and although the 1967 convention makes brief appearances in the literature it is generally portrayed as a farcical horror show. However, the motives behind, events of, and reaction to the convention reveals much about “the movement” in late sixties America.

On the morning of 16 March 1968, the men of Charlie Company, 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, US Army, entered the village of Son My, on the coast of Central Vietnam. The company was led by Captain Ernest Medina. In charge of the company's 1st Platoon was Lieutenant William Calley. The company encountered no enemy forces, no opposing fire of any kind. Its only casualty was self-inflicted. Nevertheless, by early afternoon, over 400 villagers lay dead. Those killed were – almost exclusively – either women, old men or small children. For many of the women, rape had preceded death. Other victims had been tortured and mutilated, then killed. Much of the killing, though not all, had occurred in the collection of hamlets known by the Americans as My Lai 4 and had been conducted by 1st Platoon.

One of the most curiously overlooked publishing phenomena of the 1950s was the appearance of the comic book Mad in October 1952 which “burst forth full blown from nowhere on an unsuspecting comic book reading public” into the midst of the domestic Cold War. In 1959 Newsweek observed that “Mad each month sticks a sharp-pronged fork into some part of the social anatomy” while Gloria Steinem recalled: “There was a spirit of satire and irreverence in Mad that was very important, and it was the only place you could find it in the '50s.” And even Marshall McLuhan considered Mad worthy of mention in his influential study, Understanding Media. Noting its “sudden eminence,” he attributed this to its “ludicrous and cool replay of the forms of the hot media of photo, radio, and film.” Surprisingly, very little attention has been paid towards Mad beyond its own retrospective publications, one book, and several short articles. This is unfortunate since the comic provides a sharply satiric, yet extremely perceptive insight into many aspects of Cold War America during the 1950s. Furthermore, as I shall argue, those who wrote and drew for Mad formed an alternative New York intellectual circle to that which is commonly written about. Mad's critique of America was far more effective and devastating than their better-known counterparts and consequently, Mad deserves credit as one of the sources of the counterculture of the 1960s.

Edith Wharton's ghost stories have usually been seen as skilful appropriations of the Gothic that allowed her, in Kathy Fedorko's words, to dramatise “the conflict between male and female selves in a ‘dialogue with the unconscious.’” They are also vehicles through which she expresses not only her indebtedness to her precursors in the Gothic mode, such as the Brontës, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sheridan Le Fanu, but also her independence from them. In this article we shall argue that some of Wharton's ghost stories contain a further dimension, beyond allusion, where they shift into a parodic and humorous strain that enables her to engage self-reflexively with the Gothic tradition. Here we define parody as a literary mode that, whilst engaging with a target text or genre, exhibits a keen sense of the comic, an acute awareness of intertextuality and an engagement with the idea of metafiction. This is a deliberately generous and inclusive definition that differs, for example, from some postmodern definitions of parody which (perhaps in an attempt to elevate its cultural function) minimise or excise the importance of comedy as an aspect of parody. We would suggest, furthermore, that it differs from travesty, pastiche and satire in that travesty reduces the target text to something ludicrous, pastiche “works by imitation rather than direct transformation” and satire does not necessarily engage with precursive texts.

I want you to have power because I will have power.

Roscoe Conkling Simmons (1881–1951) was an African American journalist and lifelong Republican, frequently acclaimed as the greatest orator of his day. He wrote for the Chicago Defender, the nation's largest black paper, and was later a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. A sometime advisor on black affairs to Republican administrations during the 1920s, Simmons seconded the re-nomination of Herbert Hoover for president in 1932, where “His exit from the platform was blocked by senators, committeemen, governors and others high in the public life who sought to touch ‘the hem of his garment.’” Throughout his career, the Colonel, as Simmons was often called, forged close links with black organizations. On regular speaking tours, he participated in the affairs of fraternities, churches, and educational institutions nationwide. Simmons was a social chameleon, on familiar terms with black America's most powerful businessmen and editors, entertainers and mobsters, but equally comfortable among the working men and women with whom he gossiped in barber shops and at church picnics. Senators, mayors, and aldermen admired his talent on the speaking platform and valued his connections to the black community. When white Republicans needed help in rallying northern black voters, Simmons was the fixer they summoned. He gladly obliged, out of loyalty to the Grand Old Party and in anticipation of reciprocal dispensations.

In October 1844, on returning to the United States after the four years at sea which became the basis of the majority of his early novels, Herman Melville discovered that his elder brother Gansevoort had become a political orator of national notoriety and a major figure in the Democratic presidential campaign of that year. Gansevoort Melville's political preferences, as widely reported in the newspapers of the day, were for a post-Jacksonian populism which denounced the aristocratic foppery of the Whigs and urged the immediate annexation of Texas in the name of free, white labor. His patriotic invocations of the virtues of salt-of-the-earth republicanism and the American workingman were, that year at least, hardly matched. Described in contemporary reports as “the orator of the human race” and “the great New York orator” he addressed audiences of thousands throughout New York State and at Democratic meetings as far afield as Tennessee and Ohio. He coined the respectful, evocative and adhesive nickname “Young Hickory” for James Polk the Democrat's presidential candidate and in August made a symbolic visit to the ailing Andrew Jackson. According to Hershel Parker, Melville's most recent and most exhaustive biographer, Herman spent the final days of the campaign with his brother probably participating in a huge torchlight procession through Manhattan and listening to his climactic election-night address in Newark, New Jersey.

Not many private relationships in history have received as much press attention in recent years as that between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. First alleged in 1802 by the journalist James Callender, who based his account on stories that had been current in Virginia for some years, the affair has since then been debated both in the scholarly community and by the general public to an unparalleled degree. The results of the DNA tests on male descendants of the Jefferson and Hemings families that were published in 1998 have added fuel to the debate. Meanwhile, its focus has shifted. The majority of those who have publicly expressed an opinion on the case, including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation which owns and administers Monticello, now seem to agree that a sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings did exist, and that it resulted in a number of children. The questions addressed today primarily concern the implications of the affair. What does the liaison between Jefferson and Sally Hemings mean for our understanding of the man Thomas Jefferson, and how does it affect the accomplishments he has generally been credited with? Given the little we know about her, how do we view Sally Hemings's role in the relationship, and how do we come to understand her as an individual living out her life in bondage? What, if any, are the consequences the affair has for an evaluation of interracial relationships as they existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?

Joe Christmas, the central figure of William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), is in many ways the archetypal character of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, largely because his engagement with so many regional and theoretical archetypes undermines the authority of any one of them while displaying dramatically their cumulative effect as a multiform, created life. Such is the complexity of his presence and role in Light in August and Yoknapatawpha, that he suggests himself strongly as a means of considering the personal manifestations of the county's sprawling network of readings and writings as a theoretical mass. Indeed, for one of the most apparent characters in Faulkner's work, in terms of the strength of his actions and their results, he is phenomenally hard to pin down; this, indeed, is at the root of many of his problems and the problems of those who try to define him. To an extreme extent, Christmas forces us to see creative activity on every level of the fictive process: Faulkner and his reader, Joe himself and the numerous interpreters he has in the novel, and, crucially, in the encounters and tensions between them. As such, he is a pertinent means of comprehending the analogous nature of the writing and reading to be found within Yoknapatawpha with that of the series of novels in which the county is sited. In attempting to understand Joe Christmas, therefore, we must abandon any hope of discovering any singular or defining answers, and engage with him on the dialogic terms he demands.