{"title":"\"Begin with the material\": Adrienne Rich's Nomadic Poetics","authors":"Joanna Mąkowska","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores how Adrienne Rich's poetic thinking intersects with the recently emerged new materialist and posthumanist philosophies, offering a non-reductive understanding of the embodied self as enmeshed in the nature-culture continuum, corporeal vulnerability as relational, and history as registered in the body. It argues that Rich developed a nomadic poetics: a mode of exploratory writing, which searches for \"transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can now be thought or said\" (Poetry and Social Commitment 2007), reorients the relationship between the self and others, and complicates the idea of materiality and newness. To trace how Rich's poetics was evolving over time, it looks both at her earlier theorizing on mind-matter entanglements and her later and lesser-known poem \"Letters Censored / Shredded / Returned to Sender / or Judged Unfit to Send\" (2005) published as part of Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"43 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47189290","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":"\"Endless Beginner\": Adrienne Rich's Later Work","authors":"Cynthia R. Wallace","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0011","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Abstract:</p><p>Guest editor's introduction to Special Issue.</p>","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"1 - 11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46520968","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":"\"A Way of Knowing:\" Adrienne Rich's Marxism & the Poetics of Revolution","authors":"Megan Behrent","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Adrienne Rich writes in \"Dreamwood\" \"poetry/isn't revolution but a way of knowing/why it must come\" (Fact of a Doorframe 225). Here, and throughout her work, Rich argues for an understanding of poetry that is inextricably intertwined with a political analysis of the world and an urgent belief in the necessity of social change. While Rich is renowned as a poet of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), far less attention has been paid to her later political writing and the development of her political thought from radical feminism to Marxism. Drawing on published writing and archival research, this article traces the trajectory of Adrienne Rich's political thought after the WLM's decline, focusing on her articulation of a \"politics of location\" and her contributions to Marxism, which I argue are vastly underappreciated and essential to Rich's intellectual history and her political and poetic legacy in the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"13 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45119312","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":"Teaching the Unteachable: Adrienne Rich and the Limits of Pedagogy","authors":"Alex Streim","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that one strain of Adrienne Rich's late poetry investigates the possibility of teaching others \"to be human.\" In readings of poems from Dark Fields of the Republic (1995), Midnight Salvage (1998), The School Among the Ruins (2004), Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2007), and Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2011), it tracks several aspects of Rich's interest in the practice of humanist pedagogy. Under the influence of the early Marx, as well as the educational writings of Simone Weil and Antonio Gramsci, Rich uses this late poetry to demonstrate and produce the paradoxically liberating effects of seemingly traditional teaching.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"69 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46054666","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":"\"Where do we see it from\": Revising Documentary Perspective in Adrienne Rich's \"An Atlas of the Difficult World\"","authors":"Kate Partridge","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Critics have traditionally traced the lineage of contemporary documentary poetry from leftist documentarians of the 1930s to the present through experimental movements. However, the current form of documentary poetry responds to a second line of aesthetic influence from queer and feminist women poets who attended to issues of positionality. This article will consider the role of Adrienne Rich's 1991 long poem \"An Atlas of the Difficult World\" in translating feminist concerns around positionality to documentary poetry. Rich does so by developing an auto-cartographic poetic process that centers the self in the ecological world. Rich uses the process of mapping to demonstrate the ability of poetry to extend from the self into a feminist reclamation and reimagination of the ecological world. Consideration of \"An Atlas of the Difficult World\" as a documentary project illustrates how Rich anticipated and provided a model for contemporary ethical debates in documentary poetics.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"145 - 172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45320929","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":"Adrienne Rich's Cartographies: Maps and Mapping in the Poetry and Prose","authors":"Florian Gargaillo","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article traces the importance of maps as key metaphors in Adrienne Rich's poetry and prose. In her early work of the 1950s through 1970s, she critiqued maps as emblems of received knowledge that carry prejudicial assumptions about gender, race, and class. Then, in the 1980s, she began to reclaim this object by envisioning alternative cartographies that play with the assumptions underpinning systematic methods of inquiry. Rather than pretending to offer a factual, indisputable picture of the country's spatial properties, Rich's later maps underline the sheer variety of data they contain (historical events, private memories, myths, cultural practices), and continually remind us that the information they present is subjective and provisional. By the end of her career, maps no longer symbolized an established authority requiring our submission; instead, she viewed them as a tool that could always be reinvented to apprehend the social world responsibly.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"121 - 143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48845171","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":"Adrienne Rich's Deciphering Flame","authors":"J. E. Riley","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article considers Adrienne Rich's layered use of metaphor and enthymeme in an effort to unfold the rhetorical turns Rich employed in her post-1980s poetry. Through her later poems and essays, Rich revealed the inequities marking her contemporary times, while providing a map for understanding one's own location in history—physical, emotional, political, geographical—as well as the need to build solidarity with others and to envision new structures and ways of being. Significantly, Rich didn't dictate to readers; rather, through increasingly frequent enthymemes, she invited them to (re)see and (re)consider the world around them, to become part of the meaning making process itself. This turn in Rich's later poetry ultimately marks her legacy as a citizen poet, one bent on providing the \"deciphering flame\" that illuminates the change that might emerge through collective effort.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"120 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47587784","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":"Disgust, Antebellum Vegetarianism, and the Human Animal in Thoreau’s “Higher Laws”","authors":"A. Hernandez","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:“Higher Laws” has typically been interpreted as indicating Henry David Thoreau’s ambivalence about his status as a human animal. This paper extends these readings by comparing Thoreau’s argument for vegetarianism to those of prominent antebellum reformers, Sylvester Graham and William Alcott. It argues that while Grahamites framed animal flesh-eating as an unnatural and morally repulsive practice, Thoreau focused his critique on the aberrant way humans consume meat. Significantly, Thoreau drew a distinction between a natural, wild mode of carnivorousness conducive to fulfilling one’s basic needs, and an unnatural, domesticated mode of consumption characterized by excess, pleasure, and thrill. Situated within the context of the psychology and philosophy of emotions, this paper charts the recruitment of disgust by prominent antebellum reformers to persuade readers to adopt a humane diet. It also proposes a novel account of the political efficacy of the emotion for promoting progressive social values.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"51 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41721025","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":"Ernest Gaines’s The Tragedy of Brady Sims: A Final Nod to Toni Morrison","authors":"R. Walker","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on Ernest Gaines’s final work, The Tragedy of Brady Sims (2017), which borrows its central motif, filicide, from Toni Morrison’s most celebrated novel, Beloved (1987). Like Beloved, set in the Reconstruction era, Gaines’s post–civil rights novella demonstrates that changes in the law do not directly translate into changes in the hearts and minds of people. After showing how Gaines’s literary techniques help to convey the most pessimistic vision for the future of black men that he ever presented in fiction, the essay ends by placing Gaines’s concern for black men within a wider literary milieu—a context suggesting that, despite Gaines’s tendency to set his stories in the past, he had his eye on the present. The essay also suggests that Gaines’s intertextual linking of his male-focused novel with Morrison’s female-focused one constitutes a gesture toward suturing an African American literary history increasingly segregated by gender.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"1 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46399853","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":"Hawthorne, History, and Politics: A Reassessment","authors":"S. Reznick","doi":"10.1353/arq.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay revisits Nathaniel Hawthorne’s theory of history and its implications for his political imagination in light of recent reassessments of historicist methods across the humanities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of “worldliness” as well as recent literary critical reevaluations of historicism by Rita Felski and Jeffrey Insko, the essay traces Hawthorne’s literary and intellectual development in the late 1840s and early 1850s to highlight how Hawthorne was, in fact, highly critical of the kinds of teleological theories of history that scholars have long attributed to him. In doing so, the essay seeks not only to revise the notion that Hawthorne was an inherently conservative political thinker, but also to show how a more interdisciplinary engagement with moral and political thought can deepen literary studies’ understanding of the political implications involved in rethinking historicist approaches to literature.","PeriodicalId":42394,"journal":{"name":"Arizona Quarterly","volume":"78 1","pages":"105 - 132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44508424","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}