AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Interventions: An Interview with Cristina García","authors":"Frederick Luis Aldama","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913417","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 --> Interventions<span>An Interview with Cristina García</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Frederick Luis Aldama </li> </ul> <p>Since Cristina García burst onto the global literary stage in 1992 with her critically acclaimed debut novel, <em>Dreaming in Cuban</em>, 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <strong>[End Page 69]</strong> 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.</p> <p>During the exciting launch of her whirlwind worldwide book tour of <em>Vanishing Maps</em> (2023), I had the great pleasure of learning from Cristina García.</p> <strong><small>frederick luis aldama</small></strong>: <p>Cristina, what drives you to write nonfiction, poetry, and fiction?</p> <strong><small>cristina garcía</small></s","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"2 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526939","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":"Finalists by Rae Armantrout (review)","authors":"Thomas C. Marshall","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913428","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>Finalists</em> by Rae Armantrout <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Thomas C. Marshall (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>finalists</small></em><br/> Rae Armantrout<br/> Wesleyan University Press<br/> https://www.weslpress.org/9780819580672/finalists/<br/> 176 pages; Print, $16.95 <p><em>Finalists</em> is, as we usually like a book of poetry to be, a treasury of small pleasures. The prevailing trends have taught us to expect little insights and clever wording. This book, however, uses those expectations in order to critique them. They are not just met here, but made part of how the book attacks the usual. Rae Armantrout's works have all along been twists on poetry's ways, incorporating the expected while offering new perspectives on expectations themselves.</p> <p>From \"Compound\" in <em>Crawl Out Your Window 11</em> (1983) to \"Crescendo,\" prominently placed in the October 18, 2021, <em>New Yorker</em>, Armantrout's short lyrics have kept up a throbbing basso continuo of tension within perceptions of the world and our ways of putting them into language or finding them there. Those two poems, embracing forty years of an expanding career that has brought her a Pulitzer and other honors, have in them the momentary perceptions we expect as insight from the best poets along with an undertow of penetrating social critique. Armantrout's analyses are subtle, hidden in an approach that looks at things and ways of putting things—and at the world that encompasses both of those—with the same ever-so-slight snarkiness that Dickinson used in \"Some Keep the Sabbath.\" One might call these poems <strong>[End Page 125]</strong> \"ana-lyrical,\" as they engage both analytical critical thinking and lyrical musicality in their wording. \"Crescendo\" and \"Circles\" are two of the many clear examples of this approach in <em>Finalists</em>.</p> <p>There are many dozens of other fine, enjoyably intelligent poems in the book. They often play one kind of diction against another. \"Hang On\" opens the volume with an \"unlikely eye\" and what it notices: like an empty shopping cart / parked on a ledge / above a freeway.\" The poem moves from this social-symptom image to contemplation of the beauties of a barnacle. \"Ceremonial\" juxtaposes some chemistry of poisons with a critique of communion. \"My Place\" examines emotion as if \"from a call center perspective.\" But the one the <em>New Yorker</em> put right in the middle of their article on Paul McCartney's premiere party for Peter Jackson's <em>Let It Be</em> (2021) film presents the complexity of Armantrout's analysis right where it is born—in \"languaging.\" They show how something gets put into words and what the words have to do with how we see that thing. A little close reading can unfold this process in those two two-part poems for us, and show us how to sense it throughout <em>Finalists</em>.","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"14 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512509","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":"My Body Lives Like a Threat by Megha Sood (review)","authors":"Austin Alexis","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913424","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>My Body Lives Like a Threat</em> by Megha Sood <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Austin Alexis (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>my body lives like a threat</small></em><br/> Megha Sood<br/> FlowerSong Press<br/> https://www.flowersongpress.com/store-j9lRp/p/my-body-lives-like-a-threat<br/> 96 pages; Print, $18.00 <p>Megha Sood's debut full-length poetry collection, <em>My Body Lives Like a Threat</em>, is a model of contemporary poetry at its most political. Centering around timely issues such as police brutality, the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration policy, bodily autonomy, and fake news, the book is an example of a poet's passionate engagement with the public turmoil and crises of our time. Even a glance at the table of contents reveals the collection's predilection, since the book is divided into five sections with bluntly political associations: I: Black Truth; II: War and Peace; III: My Body Is Not an Apology; IV: A Just Immigration Policy; V: My Body Lives Like a Threat.</p> <p>The first section references a number of deaths of people of color, particularly Black men, at the hands of police officers (or biased citizens) in recent years. One poem, \"A Nation in a Chokehold,\" ends with a list of victims of law enforcement: \"Here the nation remembers: / <em>Eric Garner, Briyonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd</em> / Here the nation learns again how to <em>breathe / Freely!</em>\" (the italics are Sood's). She uses them to emphasize the importance of each individual life and to exclaim over the senseless demise of these individuals. The poem \"An Act of Self Defense\" is dedicated to Ahmaud Arbery, and alludes to his mother's grief over his death, which ironically occurred while he was peacefully jogging in a neighborhood in Georgia and was not practicing his \"right to the <em>Second Amendment</em>\" to bear arms. Other poems in this section use the vocabulary associated with police misconduct: chokehold, asphyxiated, \"<em>broken prison system</em>,\" lynched, police gun, \"protest-laced streets.\" The poet stresses the universality to abuse in \"Does Hurt Have a Gender?\" by ending that poem with these interrogatory lines: <strong>[End Page 107]</strong></p> <blockquote> <p><span>Do screams have a religion too? Do cries have a race?</span><span>Does hurt have a gender? Do wounds have a nationality?</span></p> <p><span>Does your tongue curl into sin when you call out my name?</span><span>Does the triteness of ideologies still mollify your pain?</span></p> </blockquote> <p>Some of the poems in this section of the book are prose poems, as if the extremity of the violence that is chronicled is too disturbing to be rendered in verse. Two such poems—\"The People We Love, the People We Care\" and \"A Revolution by Choice\"—emphasize the isolation of activism against abuse as well as the continuing struggle t","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"13 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512515","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":"Bags and Tools: Poems by Michael Fleming (review)","authors":"Laura C. Stevenson","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913427","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>Bags and Tools: Poems</em> by Michael Fleming <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Laura C. Stevenson (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>bags and tools: poems</small></em><br/> Michael Fleming<br/> Green Writers Press<br/> https://greenwriterspress.com/book/bags-and-tools/<br/> 76 pages; Print, $15.95 <p>From the quadrameter title poem with which it begins to the celebrational sonnet with which it concludes, Michael Fleming's <em>Bags and Tools</em>, the winner of the Sundog Poetry Book Award of 2021, is a debut collection in which every poem reveals penetrating vision, crafted with such care that its technique appears effortless.</p> <p>While the collection is filled with a variety of subjects, moods, and memories that reflect a long and thoughtful poetic history, Fleming has placed his most recent works in his first section, \"Just a Word.\" As suggested by Frances Cannon's haunting sketch of a seventeenth-century plague doctor, most of the section's poems are concerned with the pandemic. Of these, the most impressive—both technically and philosophically—is \"Corona,\" a sequence of seven interlocking sonnets. The sequence opens with an echo of the Book of Genesis but quickly shifts to the perceptions of a TV audience:</p> <blockquote> <p><span>In the beginning it was just a word—some</span><span>kind of bug, a blip in the news,</span><span>another ambient danger, like murder</span><span>and bad service and diaper rash—the dues</span><span>for being alive, one more thing to think</span><span>about.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>Soon, however, the word becomes a danger that can't be dismissed:</p> <blockquote> <p><span> It began to cover the sun</span><span>and we said this isn't happening, sinking</span><span>into the sea isn't happening, none</span><span>of this is real, unpredicted eclipses</span><span>cannot occur, we will not allow <strong>[End Page 120]</strong></span> <span>it. Then all at once night fell—time was stripped</span><span>of meaning, birds stopped singing in a cloudy,</span><span>starless sky. No hint of dawn. We must</span><span>have failed to see this coming, most of us.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>\"Most of us\" implies that a few people <em>did</em> see coming doom, but while that idea hovers in the air, the second sonnet merely portrays the sorrow of a society that now recognizes its former inattention:</p> <blockquote> <p><span>We failed to see it coming, most of us,</span><span>because we never thought about the plague</span><span>or pestilence—antique notions we must</span><span>have forgotten.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>After describing suddenly newfound fear, the iambics break into a nightmare disorientation that mixes past and present:</p> <blockquote> <p><span> Everything we thought we knew</span><span>was wrong, delusional, a dream of climbing</span><span>an endless staircase made ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"11 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512523","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 Reading a Classic","authors":"Shadi Bartsch","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913414","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 Reading a Classic <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Shadi Bartsch (bio) </li> </ul> <p>We were in mid-conversation. \"Oh!\" said my student, her eyes widening. \"Vergil calls him pious all the time, and Aeneas says it of himself, but the rest of the narrative just doesn't back that up. There's the sacrifice of Italians. And he dissimulates to Dido. And he never shook Latinus's right hand for the treaty. That's not pious, not even by Roman standards. But what is Vergil <em>doing</em> then? Aeneas is the hero of the poem!\"</p> <p>\"Good question,\" I said, nodding encouragingly.</p> <p>\"And it's not just the word <em>pious</em> that's applied to him. He's virtuous and manly and in sync with the gods. But then the Italians claim he's a fop who curls his hair and wears a bonnet to war. Another contradiction,\" she adds. \"Which side are we supposed to believe?\"</p> <p>\"What if we think about the gap itself, rather than taking sides?\" I ask.</p> <p>She thinks. \"Do Aeneas and Augustus share the same kind of gap? They're both described with fine words on the surface, like in the <em>Res Gestae</em>, that list of accomplishments Augustus put out, but in his history he used to be Octavian, who was pretty nasty and did bad things before he became the <em>princeps</em>. It's like the gap where on one side, the <em>Aeneid</em> is like official praise, on the other, we see unpious stuff that Aeneas does.\"</p> <p>\"But at the same time, Vergil doesn't seem to condemn the praise, does he?\" I ask. \"Is that a simple political choice, or does it mean something more?\"</p> <p>\"I don't know,\" she says.</p> <p>\"Something to think about!\" say I.</p> <p>Our time was up, and off went my earnest reader of the poem.</p> <p>I have modeled this conversation because it shows so nicely both how students read and how they don't. My student had just engaged in interpretation level one—reading the text closely, coming up with frameworks for interpretation that were shaped by as much as she knew of the context. And there was another factor here: the sorts of questions I posed were coming from me, professor of Classics at the University of Chicago in the year 2022, the product of Western education abroad and in the US, a woman, of middle-class origin, left of center politically, animal lover and vegetarian, translator <strong>[End Page 56]</strong> of the <em>Aeneid</em>, who happened to participate in a student's political meaning-making out of the <em>Aeneid</em>, which just happened to go down this path among the many, many possible paths it could take. An awareness of this, of the contingency of one's interpretation, is what I call interpretation level two. Notice the apparent tension between the two levels: I am both aware that the discussion models a particular type of reception, <em>and</em> I believe in it, and my students end up (often) believing what I believ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"24 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526975","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 Wicking of the Broken Heart by Robin Eichele (review)","authors":"Joy Gaines-Friedler","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913429","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 Wicking of the Broken Heart</em> by Robin Eichele <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Joy Gaines-Friedler (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>the wicking of the broken heart</small></em><br/> Robin Eichele<br/> Cyberwit.net<br/> https://www.cyberwit.net/publications/1836<br/> 130 pages; Print, $15.00 <p>Robin Eichele's poems ask these heady, existential questions: Who are we? Why are we here? How do we fit? What is real? What is the world trying to teach me? What am I to know beyond the knowing? That is exactly what a lyrical poem is—a moment that reveals a knowing beyond the moment. From, \"Feeding the Pigeons\":</p> <blockquote> <p><span>In the world of small who is the smaller?</span><span>The chill of the bench seeps the heat from my thighs.</span><span>The fog of the day usurps the green of leaves.</span><span>Here is the privacy for asking</span><span>what is the consequence of matter or time or space?</span><span>Grey heads bob in Washington Square</span><span>just as they bobbed in Leicester—a sea of them–</span><span>so many years ago—pecking at crumbs with</span><span>confident precision—in cracks, on sidewalks, on</span><span>concrete and stone—tapping survival signals</span><span> demanding that I play a role as unwavering</span><span> demanding that I pose with my random rhetoricals</span><span> demanding that I scratch for meaning.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>This \"transcendentalist\" seeking of the grandeur that connects us to all things through the intermediary of the self (with the guidance of the poet) permeates the work in this collection. Eichele acts as a spiritual guide. It is clear that he sees this guidance as a calling.</p> <p>In the mid-1960s a group of students at Monteith College, an experimental liberal arts college within Wayne State University, formed the Detroit Artists' Workshop. The group included Eichele, activist John Sinclair, photographer Leni Sinclair, and others. Theirs was a radical community of students and artists <strong>[End Page 129]</strong> who not only lived together but hosted concerts, poetry readings, classes and exhibitions. They formed a press. They founded a co-operative record label, they rallied against war, and on behalf of women, they were outspoken activists, humanists, organizers, and early founders of the anti-nuclear movement. They became known as subversive, and police assigned undercover agents to infiltrate the group.</p> <p>Nearly sixty years later this volume of selected poems embodies those origins, and ideologies. Eichele generously celebrates the poet-artists. All artists. The now \"grey heads that bob\" are indeed those radical, soul-seeking, cultural icons of that community of artists, poets, professors, and musicians in Detroit and elsewhere, those who have not and will not give up, as Eichele proclaims, \"scratching for meaning.\" His tr","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138542263","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 Many Names for Mother by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, and: Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk (review)","authors":"Duane Niatum","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913423","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 Many Names for Mother</em> by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, and: <em>Apricots of Donbas</em> by Lyuba Yakimchuk <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Duane Niatum (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>the many names for mother</small></em><br/> Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach<br/> Kent State University Press<br/> https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/2019/the-many-names-for-mother/#:~:text=Julia%20Kolchinsky%20Dasbach&text=The%20Many%20Names%20for%20Mother%20is%20an%20exploration%20of%20intergenerational,they%20reflect%20on%20the%20past.<br/> 112 pages; Print, $17.00 <em><small>apricots of donbas</small></em><br/> Lyuba Yakimchuk<br/> Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina<br/> Lost Horse Press<br/> https://losthorsepress.org/catalog/apricots-of-donbas/#:~:text=Apricots%20of%20Donbas%2C%20by%20award,in%20a%20dual%20language%20edition.<br/> 166 pages; Print, $24.00 <p>It is an honor and a pleasure to introduce to you two of the major contemporary Ukrainian poets. The current situation in Ukraine has brought me out of my book review retirement. Writing this review is the least I can do for fellow poets facing one of the worst crises in modern history, an unprovoked war that is a threat to their individual lives and an attempt to wipe out their culture and history.</p> <p>Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of <em>The Many Names for Mother</em>, is a poet of origins, ancestry, memory, and language. These are the central motivators for the poems in her provocative and heart-wrenching lines revealed concisely with concrete detail. I am able to get closer to these poems and their personal <strong>[End Page 100]</strong> and historical revelations because of watching the news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that is now more than a year old.</p> <p>And like other notable Ukrainian poets and novelists, she honors her family's history that she brings into the present moment. She does this, she says, because she cannot move forward without this important part of her memory, dreams, and potential future. And, of course, her life is brought into focus in the way her words explore the journey her life has taken. But most importantly, this life is anchored to the many names for mother, as the title of her collection points to.</p> <p>This is a passage from her poem \"Inheritance\":</p> <blockquote> <p><span>And in that distance, who can tell</span><span>igniting times apart? The difference</span><span>between the lived and the passed down:</span><span>the sundials shadow at noon?</span><span> I'm wishing</span><span>again today still last night—</span><span>in flux like sand and water and ancestry.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>We see how Kolchinsky Dasbach's story flows on like a river of memory and will never be lost or forgotten. She is a poet who leaves no stone unturned to face the reader. T","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"12 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512516","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":"We Have Never Been Ancient","authors":"Joseph Farrell","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913415","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 --> We Have Never Been Ancient <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Joseph Farrell (bio) </li> </ul> <p>One of William Faulkner's most famous epigrams tells us that \"The past is never dead. It's not even past.\" But those who repeat or paraphrase Faulkner, and even Faulkner himself, are usually concerned with a past that is not very deep. It's really just a matter of a few generations. On the other hand, \"that's ancient history,\" a tediously common phrase that refers to a deeper antiquity, is used to dismiss something as utterly unimportant and irrelevant. This attitude is in no way exclusive to the uneducated or the anti-intellectual. A shallow view of the past is officially embraced by the history department of my own university, which requires undergraduate majors to take as few as one course that includes some material earlier than the nineteenth century. Nor is it unusual in this. The entire structure of all academic institutions, not to mention many other pillars of our society, seems dedicated to the proposition that the deep past is not very important. To those who study a culture that thrived not two hundred but two thousand years ago and more, it isn't obvious that this is a good thing. That's why it might be surprising to realize that our own discipline is part of the problem.</p> <p>Classics as an academic discipline was shaped in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the same forces that reshaped entire universities, promoted the nation-state as the ideal political structure, and distinguished firmly between the categories of \"ancient\" and \"modern.\" This distinction is fundamental to the way most people today view human history over the <em>longue durée</em>. So familiar is it that it seems almost natural. That is why it is so shocking to realize that it amounts to little more than a rhetorical gambit.</p> <p>The most daring use of this gambit was by Friedrich Schiller in an influential essay \"On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry\" (1795–96). Like many contemporaries, Schiller felt vividly aware that he was living in a brave new world, a \"modern\" one different from any that had existed before. His purpose in this essay was to articulate the aesthetic principles of that world, specifically with reference to its most characteristic form, the novel. But how to accomplish that? Even today the novel continues to resist efforts to define it in terms of <strong>[End Page 60]</strong> form, essence, or any other quality. Schiller faced the difficulty of defining it as a reflection of the rapidly developing, heterogeneous character of the contemporary world in which the genre was becoming so prominent. But how to define anything that is defined mainly by indeterminacy?</p> <p>Schiller's great stroke of genius was to define the novel, and modernity itself, not per se but <em>in contrast to</em> some putatively simpler conce","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526931","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":"Death to Classics","authors":"Shane Butler","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913408","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 --> Death to Classics <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Shane Butler (bio) </li> </ul> <p>As the late August evening gave way to night, I was packing my bags to leave the next day for Rome, where, among other things, I would write the dissertation that I would defend upon my return to New York two and a half years later. The windows of my apartment were open, sending the nocturnal purr of the city in on late-summer breezes that invited sleep. In an effort to resist them, I turned on the television that I otherwise seldom used except for the evening news and planted my suitcase on a table in front of it. I do not remember what was on and doubtless didn't much care then. It was tuned to ABC, where it had been for the news a few hours before—I had a weakness for the bemused gravitas of anchor Peter Jennings—so I left it there. The clothes I packed were rather rudimentary, with the exception of an ill-fitting suit I had bought on what would turn out to be the mistaken report that such was required for dinner at the American Academy in Rome. Books, however, were what mostly went in, including the Latin dictionary that had followed me since my undergraduate days, inscribed with each new phone number, which, back then of course, used to change with every move.</p> <p>As I folded, shifted, and crammed, whatever was on the television was interrupted by a \"special report,\" the regular term when the reporting of \"breaking news\" was still an extraordinary event. The face behind the desk was not that of Jennings, who no doubt was home in bed, but that of a reporter I had never seen before and who himself seemed nervously surprised to be there. Princess Diana, he announced, had been in a serious car crash in Paris and had been rushed from the scene to the hospital. ABC News would of course be back as further information became available, but for now we were being returned to our regularly scheduled programming. I remember laughing, not at the news, but at the reporter, whose few words were enough to capture what struck my sympathetic ears as a voice that could only come from another gay man. The network, I said to myself, would never have allowed him in front of a camera in prime time. Indeed, had the news been about anything other than a princess, they surely would have dragged Jennings, or at least one of his regular proxies, back to the studio. <strong>[End Page 29]</strong></p> <p>As for Diana—well, to call me an anti-royalist would be to exaggerate my level of interest in the matter. It is true that, in a curious prefiguration of the story I am recalling, my mother had roused me in the predawn hours sixteen years before in order to watch her wedding to Prince Charles live on television. I must have encouraged this plan, though I cannot remember why. Were we both trying to say something about me that I myself, on the eve of my twelfth birthda","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"42 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138526996","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":"Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents by Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount (review)","authors":"Jan Garden Castro","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913433","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>Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents</em> by Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jan Garden Castro (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>winslow homer: crosscurrents</small></em><br/> Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount<br/> The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Distributed by Yale University Press)<br/> https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9781588397478/winslow-homer/<br/> 200 pages; Cloth, $50.00 <p><em>Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents</em>, the catalog for the exhibition traveling to the National Gallery, London (10 September 2022–8 January 2023), underscores the show's point: Homer applied his powerful painting prowess and narrative talent to capture both ocean and societal crosscurrents. Sylvia Yount terms this his \"lifelong concerns with race and the environment.\" Yount is the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her colleague Stephanie L. Herdrich, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture in the American Wing, closes the volume by discussing how the artist framed race, class, and gender disparities as he painted nature's magnificence and its destructive force. <em>The Gulf Stream</em>, an 1899 painting reworked by 1906, is the show's centerpiece, displaying a lone Black man adrift at sea in a boat with a broken mast, surrounded by sharks. Homer used the sea literally and metaphorically in an age following the Civil War and Reconstruction, when Jim Crow laws and racist violence marginalized and endangered the Black populace.</p> <p>Herdrich's essay, \"Crosscurrents: Conflict, Nature, and Mortality in Winslow Homer's Art,\" dives into the vortex of this exhibition and painting as she quotes curator H. Barbara Weinberg's comment that <em>The Gulf Stream</em> and other paintings \"seem to ask as many questions as they answer.\" The same could be said about this exhibition and catalog. Experts mention Homer's one month of classes in the Barbizon style in New York and mostly speculate about the rest of his art education. Even though Homer's father and brother <strong>[End Page 149]</strong> are mentioned and seem central to his life, readers learn almost nothing about Homer's family or friends. We are sent to footnoted sources if we're curious about whether he had any romantic relationships. Similarly, we are told that the water currents of the Atlantic are central to Homer's body of work but given only general information that Homer's knowledge of this body of water came from oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury and was filtered through a religious source, George Chaplin Child, who believed in divine providence. Ocean patterns are discussed only as they were historically understood in 1857. Herdrich's best discussion of currents is in her consideration of <em>The Herring Net</em> (1885), where she points out \"the inherent ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"15 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512507","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}