AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Philology No More? Latin and Greek on the Sidelines","authors":"Nigel Nicholson","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913413","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Philology No More?<span>Latin and Greek on the Sidelines</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Nigel Nicholson (bio) </li> </ul> <p>No one would raise an eyebrow if an undergraduate philosophy major at an American university studied Hegel, Kant, or de Beauvoir without knowing German or French. Nor would anyone raise an eyebrow if an undergraduate history major studied the Russian Revolution without Russian, or New Spain without Spanish—let alone Nahuatl or indeed Latin—even if this work constituted a senior capstone project. This is not a question of resources; it is true at the wealthiest schools. The simple fact is that, at the undergraduate level, mastery of the relevant languages has long ceased to be considered integral to history or philosophy.</p> <p>In coming years I suspect Classics will go the same way: the discipline will increasingly define studying its materials without command of Latin or Greek as the norm, and while some teaching of the languages will be provided by better-resourced institutions, language study will not just be peripheral in undergraduate education, but be accepted as peripheral, and its absence will not be understood as a failure or a loss.</p> <p>Classics has long been centered around language. Until 2013 the North American professional association of classicists, which was founded in 1869, was known as the American Philological Association. Philology has a range of meanings, but all stress the study of words, whether texts or—especially in Britain—languages themselves. At Reed College, where I teach, until recently we required a year of advanced work in one language and a year of at least introductory work in the other. My undergraduate degree, at Oxford, was centered around large swaths of Greek and Latin, although it was impressed upon us that our reading lists had been considerably reduced from what confronted previous generations. In American universities Classics departments are usually grouped with modern language departments, and in many institutions, historians of ancient Greece and Rome find their home in these Classics departments, not in history departments, and often teach Latin or Greek language classes. I know nowhere where this is true for the modern languages. Historians of France and Spain hold appointments in history departments, and do not teach the languages. <strong>[End Page 51]</strong></p> <p>Control of language—language in general, rather than just Latin or Greek—has long been a central part of the mythology of Classics. Certainly, the study of Latin will teach you grammar and syntax, and enlarge your English vocabulary, but in my youth there was also a clear sense that such control was a key to power and influence. One of the most popular sitcoms in 1980s Britain, the BBC's <em>Yes, Minister</em>, revolved around the interactions of Jim Hacker, the Minister for Admi","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"103 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward a Comparative Classics","authors":"Paul Allen Miller","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913410","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Toward a Comparative Classics <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Paul Allen Miller (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Last March I found myself in the Sultanate of Oman preparing to give a commencement address at the National University of Science and Technology. I had flown in a few days earlier to recover from the jet lag, and I decided to take advantage of my time to leave the bustling, modern city of Muscat and journey to the ancient capitol of Nizwa in the interior. Historically, Oman was known as Oman <em>and</em> Muscat because it had two centers of power. Muscat was on the coast and was ruled by the Sultan. It faced outward toward India and Africa and is thought to have been the original home of Sinbad the Sailor. Nizwa in the interior was ruled by the Imam. It was a center of Islamic learning and home of the Ibadi sect, which claims to be the oldest form of Islam, predating the Shia/Sunni split. There are many beautiful things to see in Nizwa and its environs, including its famous goat and camel souk, but the most striking thing I saw was the Shawadhna Mosque, first built in the seventh century, shortly after the Prophet had sent a letter in 630 asking the inhabitants to convert, which they did immediately and without coercion. The mosque is a simple structure without minarets or a dome, made of plaster and mud brick.</p> <p>I stood before it and I considered the young people I would address the next day, young men and women (more women than men), engineers, doctors, and pharmacists, who were not only ambitious soon-to-be professionals but also committed to the development of Oman. Beneath their caps and gowns they would wear traditional dress. The young women would have their hair covered. The ceremony would open with a prayer and a recitation of the Qur'an, as do all significant events in Oman. And as I stood there, I asked myself, if I were one of these young women, modern, well educated and yet traditional, what could it possibly mean to be Omani and not be Islamic? How could Islam, even if one were secular, not be fundamental to your identity, your aesthetic, your language, the structure of your dreams? How could forsaking that identity not mean becoming Western and consumerist, adopting the culture of the powers that had sought to colonize you, surrendering what made you you? <strong>[End Page 38]</strong></p> <p>Oman, in this regard, is not unique. It is part of a larger Islamic culture that has many regional and sectarian variations, that includes both the Arab and the Persian world, that intersects with Western classical culture in various ways, from the Islamic conquests to the great Muslim scholars, who preserved and commented upon Aristotle, to the mathematicians in Baghdad who built on the studies of the Pythagoreans and their successors. There is a complex, multi-layered cultural world here that intersects with our own b","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"18 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Collected Works of Kathleen Tankersley Young ed. by Erik La Prade and Joshua Rothes (review)","authors":"Julie Mellby","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913430","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Collected Works of Kathleen Tankersley Young</em> ed. by Erik La Prade and Joshua Rothes <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Julie Mellby (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>the collected works of kathleen tankersley young</small></em><br/> Edited by Erik La Prade and Joshua Rothes<br/> Sublunary Editions<br/> https://sublunaryeditions.com/products/the-collected-works-kathleen-tankersley-young<br/> 248 pages; Print, $22.00 <p>On the last day of 1933, the <em>New York Times</em> poetry critic Eda Lou Walton reviewed a series of pamphlets issued by Modern Editions Press. \"These pamphlets represent the poets who are experimenting with new forms and whose eyes are fixed upon the contemporary scene,\" she began. Several of the eight poets needed introductions and context for the reading public to appreciate her commentary on their work, but of the recently deceased Kathleen Tankersley Young (1902–33) she wrote, \"Young is, on the other hand, fairly well known, and her poem of dream imagery is fairly characteristic of her work.\"</p> <p>Thanks to <em>The Collected Works of Kathleen Tankersley Young</em>, we now know that Walton's assessment was far from accurate. The enigmatic Young lived and died mysteriously, leaving those who thought they knew her, or knew her work, misguided at best and at times deliberately fooled. In less than seven short years, from the date of her first published poem to her untimely death (officially suicide by Lysol poisoning), Young's writing fluctuated from rhyming couplets to typographically inventive free verse, bravely charting erotic dreamscapes and desolate realities, published in some of the most influential academic and bohemian journals of her day. And then she was gone and the world moved on.</p> <p>Editors Erik La Prade and Joshua Rothes have succeeded in gathering 154 published and unpublished works (primarily poetry), and while they concede <strong>[End Page 133]</strong> there may be yet undiscovered material, this collection provides far more than any other available source on Young's life and work. What the <em>Collected Works</em> makes clear is that Young's writing deserves our attention and has earned its way back onto the bookshelves of contemporary scholars in American modernism.</p> <p>Along with the expected and best-known poems from her three published books—<em>Ten Poems</em> (1930), <em>The Dark Land</em> (1932), and <em>The Pepper Trees</em> (1932)—the <em>Collected Works</em> includes Young's personal contributions to the esteemed <em>Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms</em> (1929–30), and the aforementioned Modern Editions pamphlets (1932–33). This is worth mentioning, because Young is often better remembered for her administrative contributions to these titles, as cofounder and editor working with Charles Henry Ford at the former and Eric Naul at the latter (","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"15 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"It's About Time by Barry Wallenstein (review)","authors":"Melinda Thomsen","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913435","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>It's About Time</em> by Barry Wallenstein <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Melinda Thomsen (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>it's about time</small></em><br/> Barry Wallenstein<br/> New York Quarterly<br/> https://www.nyq.org/books/title/its-about-time<br/> 128 pages; Print, $18.95 <p>The cover of Barry Wallenstein's <em>It's About Time</em> shows an hourglass overfilled with sand, and Wallenstein's poems work together like moving grains of sand. They drop from the upper globe through a narrow passageway to land in a new place outside of themselves. This collection, as a whole, concludes with a feeling that time has an endless quality through the rich language Wallenstein combines with his humor, irony, and memories. Readers are almost drawn into another dimension where time no longer operates by the physics of this ancient timepiece.</p> <p>When turning the first page, the hourglass turns upside down, and sands of time begin to fall, as the opening poems consider time in respect to yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Next, in the six middle sections, sand slows to pass through the narrow tube where the poet examines a range of source material from desire to COVID where wind often functions as a metaphor for the uncertainty connecting these topics. In the last two sections, sand gathers in the bottom glass globe where poems about end-of-life themes overfill the hourglass. This sand clock progression contains rich poems filled with heartbreaking understanding from a variety of viewpoints and unexpected connections.</p> <p>The opening poems set up Wallenstein's perspective on time, as the speaker says, \"Remember, we never wasted a moment— / not a jot in the rush— / your backroom, an hourglass on its side.\" The poems in the midsection of the journey focus on the way time is consumed by various speakers who have patched themselves together. Of course, these speakers make good and bad <strong>[End Page 160]</strong> choices, but that is part of the ride, so this collection encourages us to accept the natural riff of our own time, which will lead to, if not a happy ending, at least a peaceful one.</p> <p>When a poem steps into time, sometimes there is an \"I\" or a \"he\" speaking, but inanimate objects contribute their views too, like the perspective of an autumn leaf in the poem \"Autumn Leaf.\" However, the \"I\" and \"he\" voices consistently appear throughout the collection. These viewpoints add a dimension to \"time,\" which takes readers out of the sequential role of time, and puts them in one resonating moment. In \"Twins,\" the \"he\" gives some clues to this pronoun's active role in many poems, and why a variety of personas reverberate through the collection:</p> <blockquote> <h3>Twins</h3> <p><span>He was born a twin</span><span>but solitary—brotherless, sisterless</span><span>an odd number, a one.</span></p> <p><span","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"14 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Invisible Audiences: The Pathos of Vision in Charles Altieri's Late Poetics","authors":"Daniel T. O'Hara","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913437","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Invisible Audiences<span>The Pathos of Vision in Charles Altieri's Late Poetics</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) </li> </ul> <p><em>Literature, Education, and Society: Bridging the Gap</em> (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 <em>Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning</em> (1981), <em>Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism</em> (1989), and <em>The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects</em> (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.</p> <p>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 <em>boundary 2</em>, 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, <strong>[End Page 169]</strong> some would now say the abysses, separating the institution of literature and literary study, higher education, and American society, despite the overlaps among them.</p> <p>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,","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"12 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Debts","authors":"Dan-el Padilla Peralta","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913416","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Debts <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dan-el Padilla Peralta (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>Only way he comin' back is through his unborns</p> —Lil Wayne, \"Uproar\" (2018) </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>I use the word <em>valuation</em> 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 <em>prospect</em> 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. <strong>[End Page 64]</strong></p> <p>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 <em>reparative</em>: not only must it directly confront the ill-gotten gains of racial capitalism, it must a","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"2 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unlearning Limits","authors":"Brooke Holmes","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913407","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Unlearning Limits <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Brooke Holmes (bio) </li> </ul> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <small>bce</small> Athens; Rome of the first centuries <small>bce</small> and <small>ce</small>). 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 <strong>[End Page 24]</strong> of Classics as an academic field in Europe and the US through processes imbricated in biopolitical racism, empire, nationalism, and fascism.</p> <p>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","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"498 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The \"Priceless Risk\" of J. Drew Lanham: Poet Laureate of Edgefield County, South Carolina","authors":"Renee H. Shea","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913432","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The \"Priceless Risk\" of J. Drew Lanham<span>Poet Laureate of Edgefield County, South Carolina</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Renee H. Shea </li> </ul> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <em>The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature</em> (2016) and of <em>Sparrow Envy</em> (2017), a poetry collection. Forthcoming books include <em>Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves</em> and <em>Range Maps: Birds, Blackness, and Loving Nature between the Two</em>.</p> <p>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 <strong>[End Page 142]</strong> 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,\" <em>Orion Magazine</em>, 21 February 2018). As poet laureate, he continues to unearth those stories, often transforming them into poems and inspiring others to do the same.</p> <p><em>(The following conversation occurred via Zoom and email in March 2023.)</em></p> <blockquote> <strong><small>renee h. shea</small></strong>: <p>In the opening of <em>The Home Place</em> you write: \"I am a man in love with nature. I am an eco-addict . . . a wildling . . . an ornithologist, wildlife ecologist, and college professor . .","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"13 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Salernitan Questions","authors":"Anthony Madrid","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913418","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> On the Salernitan Questions <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Anthony Madrid (bio) </li> </ul> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <em>that</em>, and so on, until he winds up a world expert on \"Question\" literature, aka \"Problem\" literature. It turns out there's this rich history.</p> <p>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, <em>The Salernitan Questions</em> (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 \"<em>Speculator</em> 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.\"</p> <p>I found out about <em>The Salernitan Questions</em> 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:</p> <blockquote> <p>\"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 <strong>[End Page 75]</strong> 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.</p> <p>\"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?\"</p> </blockquote> <p>You have to understand: There is no \"correct\" answer to","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"1 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Images and the Discipline of the Classics","authors":"Patrice D. Rankine","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913411","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Images and the Discipline of the Classics <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Patrice D. Rankine (bio) </li> </ul> <p>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 <em>The Society of Spectacle</em> (1967). Anthropologist Rania Sweis (<em>Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt</em> [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.</p> <p>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. <strong>[End Page 42]</strong> 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","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"20 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}