{"title":"“Beholding the Lamb of God”: Jupiter Hammon, the First America’s Black Christian Poet","authors":"O. Panova","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-198-212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-198-212","url":null,"abstract":"The role of Christianity as a factor that exerted a decisive influence over African American social and cultural history, is being debated time and again in the course of African American studies. The ambivalent attitude of the 18th –19th century Christian preachers and missionaries to slavery, egalitarian tendencies that combined with the idea of humility and resignation, led to contradictions and controversy in the evaluation of the role Christianity played in Afroamerica. The case of Jupiter Hammon (1711 –1806?), a preacher and the first Black Christian poet in America, illustrates the emergence of the basic topoi in the pre-war Blackamerican literary tradition: conversion to Christianity and literacy (enculturation) as two essential conditions for the acknowledgement of Black humanity and ability to integrate into the New World civilization. Jupiter Hammon refused to struggle against slavery; paradoxically, however, his work is an inherent part of both African American religious and cultural history and the New England Christian thought, that engendered Abolitionism and its most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (1852), based on the concept of the “religious genius” of the African and the “Black redemption” of the greatest American vice, slavery.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68678796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Language Poetry to the New Concretism: The Evolution of the Avant-Garde","authors":"M. Perloff","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-10-36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-10-36","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the trajectory of the Western avant-garde in the 20th century, in connection with the group formations characteristic of these movements. Movements such as the Russian avant-garde and European Dadaism are classified according to various criteria, and their rise and fall is traced. After a broad overview of avant-garde movements, the first part of the essay analyzes the cases of the modern avant-garde movement “Language Poetry”. The article then goes on to detail the theoretical principles of the “language movement” founded in the late 1970s, and then explore how this radical movement has developed over the past twenty years. Language poetics, closely associated with French poststructuralist aesthetics and Marxist ideology, was gradually assimilated into the mainstream, and its stylistic features were absorbed into more traditional modes. The movement is now mostly over, but it has produced a number of important poets such as Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian and Steve McCaffery. These poets now associate themselves outside the language movement they used to be part of and are eventually arriving their own styles. In the last part of the article, the author refers to the Latin American movement of concretism as a phenomenon that synthesizes the achievements of the Russian and European avant-garde and the American neo-avant-garde.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68679045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Linguo-Pragmatic Shifts in Contemporary Poetry: Russian-American Parallels","authors":"O. V. Sokolova, E. V. Zakharkiv","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-115-142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-115-142","url":null,"abstract":"The paper dwells upon the language and discourse processes in contemporary Russian and American poetry which focuses on “reformatting” the communicative situation coordinates under the influence of ordinary speech and the new media. The research suggests a linguo-pragmatic analysis of three Russian-American poetic vectors that characterize different strategies of subjectification, such as Gennady Aygi — Michael Palmer, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko — Barrett Watten, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis — Nika Skandiaka. These poetic practices manifest themselves in constructing a new communicative situation based on a referential shift along the lines of interiorization — exteriorization. Elaborating on this shift, we explore the interaction between inner speech, ordinary and poetic language, as well as the links between a poetic text and external (media)context. The unusual usage of pragmatic markers forms a new “poetic interface” and indicates the “transcoding” of the poetic subject in the coordinates of the actual communicative situation. Aygi and Palmer create different modes of poetic interface as a zone of active interaction between the addresser and the addressee, as well as inner speech, ordinary, and poetic language. In Dragomoshchenko’s and Watten’s poems, the “transcoding” of the subject manifests itself in various deictic shifts that mark complex relations of the subject with reality and language. The use of “graphic deixis” in DuPlessis’ and Skanidaka’s texts is informed by the impact of the Internet as a need to update the poetic statement in a new media-communicative situation.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68679093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"T.S. Eliot and the Sense of History","authors":"Benjamin G. Lockerd","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-134-147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-134-147","url":null,"abstract":"Eliot’s deep interest in ideas about history began early and continued throughout his life. In his student days, he encountered the concepts of human pre-history put forward by early anthropologists such as Emile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He studied under Josiah Royce and George Santayana, was aware of the historical writing of his distant relative Henry Adams. The paper also dwells at some length on Eliot’s attitude to the “Whig historians” and the Criterion-group historians. As Eliot entered the Christian fold, his idea of history became that of the Bible and the Church. He followed St. Augustine, was deeply influenced by the British Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. As a Christian, Eliot rejected both progressive and regressive views of history as well as determinism in favor of a belief in free will, the doctrine of Original Sin and faith in Providence. Eliot’s views involve a challenge to the secular view of history, and his key terms are based on his Christian vision: the “historical sense”, in the meaning of awareness of “tradition”, which carries the truths of Revelation and the wisdom of the ages forward in time, adapting them somewhat to various times and cultures but remaining faithful to the essential truths, the “permanent things.”","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68680061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bureau “Transatlantic”: French and US Poets on Rendezvous","authors":"K. Korchagin","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-261-273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-261-273","url":null,"abstract":"Since the middle of the 19th century, American literature has been perceived by French poets as a kind of Other, at the same time alien and attractive, capable of teaching the experience of liberation, which the French poets themselves lack. Nevertheless, the situation is more familiar when other poets of the world are looking for inspiration in French poetry. French poetry for American modernists of the first quarter of the 20th century was synonymous with everything that expands the horizons of literature. At the same time, the reverse situation, when French poetry is saturated with outside influences, in particular, American ones, is studied much worse. Abigail Lang's book tries to fill this gap, considering the transformations that the new, “post-Surrealist” French poetry is experiencing under the impression of the new American poetry. The book is divided into three chapters: the first one deals with the reception of objectivism since the 1970s to the present, the second one deals with the problem of the “transatlantic” poetic community, which manifests itself in various forms and genres, and, finally, the third one tells about the “speech turn,” which, from the author's point of view, takes place in French poetry of recent decades.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68679418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Santha Rama Rau: A Footnote to History?","authors":"C. Chatterjee","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-224-247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-224-247","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes Santha Rama Rau’s 1959 travelogue, My Russian Journey, and places it in the context of Soviet-American relations in the early decades of the Cold War. Rau, an eminent Indian American novelist, was commissioned by the literary travel magazine, Holiday, to write articles on the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. She was recruited for her literary ability, but her personal relations with important personalities in the United States and India gave her an unusual degree of access to members of the Soviet cultural elite. Rau’s leisurely travels through different parts of the Soviet Union resulted in a new kind of travel account of everyday life in the Soviet Union. I analyze three major themes in My Russian Journey: the problem of Soviet censorship, descriptions of elite lifestyles in the Soviet Union, and a comparison of Soviet and Indian national identity. I argue that the publication of Rau’s My Russian Journey marked an important milestone in Soviet American relations that was mediated through India.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68679882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To the Symbolism of T.S. Eliot's Anthological Poem","authors":"V. M. Tolmatchoff","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-61-108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-61-108","url":null,"abstract":"The paper examines in detail the history of the creation of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, as well as the methods of its research in Western and Russian literary studies. The author proposes to combine a careful reading of this text with the notion of this poem as a spiritual autobiography of Eliot, which has various dimensions: from personal, proper poetic to esoteric. Based on the analysis of the biography of the young Eliot, the poet's relationship with J. Verdenal, the history of the poem, the drafts, the final text, the title of the poem, the epigraph, the poem's place in the poet's work, Eliot's statements about “Prufrock” the paper identifies the parameters of the symbolism of this work, which, playing on Eliot's complex relationship with the inexpressible (having an ambivalent nature), extends to its composition (the relationship of “I” and “you”; the paradoxical nature of the ending), the system of images and motifs (Prufrock as a theatrical person, the opposition of the male and female world), the special sense of reminiscences from Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, the philosophy of creativity as a mystery (Prufrock as a poet, combination of eroticism and mysticism, the theme of sacred crime) and love (homoerotic theme), genre (elusiveness of genre, Faustian beginning in it), symbolism and esoterics (“Prufrock” as a Masonic text on initiation, on life as theatre). The author gave a special place to the concretization of ekphrases (Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Burne-Jones), the content of which confirms the thesis that the poem has a text in the text.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68680539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Redemptive Sacrifice in J. Gardner’s Novel Grendel: An Analysis of the Novel’s Poetics in Light of Ritual-Mythological Criticism","authors":"Antony Kalashnikov","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2021-10-83-99","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-10-83-99","url":null,"abstract":"The paper presents an analysis of the novel Grendel (1971) by American writer J. Gardner (1933–1982) in light of M. Eliade’s, R. Girard’s and V. Toporov’s concepts of myth and ritual studies. Literary studies concerning the ritual-mythological aspect of the novel are reviewed in the article. The research hypothesis suggests that the key features of Gardner’s poetics can be systematically analyzed in the context of myth and ritual. Meanwhile, the bulk of previous research covering the issue tended to rely primarily on other analytical frameworks, like P. Bourdieu's sociology of literature (B. Ekelund) or the theory of intertextuality (H. Ellis, W. Ober), the myth and ritual theory playing a supplementary role. While placing myth and ritual theory at the core of the methodology, the present study highlights its two key categories singled out in line with B. Malinowski’s “functionalist” view of myth and ritual as two complementary aspects of the archaic culture — the “theoretical” one (myth) and the “practical” one (ritual). Here they are presented as the etyological nature of myth (i.e. its ability to view all phenomena as dependent on the primordial origin of the universe) and the redemptive sacrificial ritual. Accordingly, the etyologization of Grendel’s narrative and the presentation of the protagonist as an “emissary victim” (in Girard’s terms) are the specific features of Gardner’s poetics which the paper primarily addresses.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68678317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes from Underground: In English","authors":"I. Nadel","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2021-11-82-133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-11-82-133","url":null,"abstract":"This chronological survey of English translations of Notes from Underground covering the years 1913–2014 evaluates the treatment of the text from various, often contradictory, perspectives. Well-known and unknown translators and editors offer sometimes opposing versions of the text aided by various ancillary materials which range from biographical information to a detailed chronology of Dostoevsky’s life plus excerpts from contemporary documents and modern critical evaluations. A number of the translations are designed expressly for students, others for those with limited or no knowledge of Dostoevsky, Russian history or the Russian language. No single introduction or translation emerges as the most insightful or accurate, although those of the last two decades are more idiomatic. Influencing this is often the background of the editor or translator. American editors focus on the context of Dostoevsky’s creation, English or Russian editors concentrate on the core elements that emphasize either the Russian literary tradition or late 19th century Russian politics and its importance for Dostoevsky’s conception of the story. Almost all editors consider the narrative experimentation of the work and the structural differences between Parts I and II. A number of the editors also address the Existential quality of the text, while translators confront the difficulties of capturing Dostoevsky’s sometime idiosyncratic prose.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68678828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Flowers for Louise Gluck, or On the Possible Uses of Poetic Pragmatism","authors":"T. Venediktova","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2021-10-135-152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-10-135-152","url":null,"abstract":"May not a “sorceress”/poet be “a pragmatist at heart” (Louise Gluck)? How does her “sorcery” — to quote the Nobel jury: using “poetic voice” to make “individual existence universal” — communicate and work in her readers? How may the notion of language as experience inherited from the pragmatist tradition inform literary pedagogy in the age of globalization? A sample of recent (December 2020) readings of Louise Gluck’s poems by Moscow University students is considered, including their judgments on the measure and scope of the poet’s “universality”. Slow motion, experiential reading inviting “disentrenchment” of the subject position is suggested as a useful alternative to text-centredness and insistence on the unique and holistic nature of the cultural context.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68678042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}