Results by title

An examination of director Todd Haynes and his Bob Dylan biopic.

As the first and only Bob Dylan “biopic,” I’m Not There caused a stir when released in 2007. Offering a surreal retelling of moments from Dylan’s life and career, the film is perhaps best known for its distinctive approach to casting, including Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin, a Black child actor, as versions of Dylan though none of the characters bear his name. Greenlit by Bob Dylan himself, the film uses Dylan’s music as a score, a triumph for famed queer filmmaker Todd Haynes after encountering issues with copyright in previous projects.

Noah Tsika eloquently characterizes all the ways that Dylan and Haynes harmonize in their methods and sensibilities, interpreting the rule-breaking film as a biography that refuses chronology, disdains factual accuracy, flirts with libel, and cannibalizes Western cinema. Fitting the film’s inspiration, creation, and reception alongside its continuing afterlife, Tsika examines Dylan’s music in the film through the context of intellectual property, raising questions about who owns artistic material and artistic identities and how such material can be reused and repurposed. Tsika’s adventurous analysis touches on gender, race, queerness, celebrity, popular culture, and the law, while offering much to Haynes and Dylan fans alike.

In the second century CE, the multiethnic, multilingual, and religiously diverse Roman Empire grew to its greatest extent. To maintain order, Rome relied heavily on strict social hierarchies, established not only through legal frameworks like citizenship, but also through cultural markers (such as clothing and language) and personal traits (such as educational achievement). Even as Rome grew into one of the world’s most powerful empires, however, its social systems strained under the stresses caused by that very growth, which encouraged cultural interaction, long-distance travel, and social mobility—all of which threatened the hierarchies that underpinned Roman order.

It was during this time that the North African–born, Latin-speaking, Greek-educated Apuleius—whose own background showcases the multiplicity of identities available then to Roman individuals—flourished. He remains one of the ancient world’s best-known authors today, thanks particularly to his famous novel, Metamorphoses, known also as The Golden Ass. Taking a bird’s-eye view of his work, Ashli J. E. Baker proffers a bold new reading of Apuleius, proposing that across his writings there is a consistent focus on the theme of identity and its instability. By placing close readings in conversation with sociocultural and material contexts, she shows that because the structures of Roman power depended on inherently unreliable markers of identity, Apuleius’ work can be read as a biting critique of the fraught relationship between the individual, society, and the state in his contemporary Rome.

Erickson examines the work of Marianne Moore in order to provide some consistently successful strategies for understanding her poetry

In 1935, T.S. Eliot wrote that Marianne Moore’s poems “form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time.” In this comprehensive critical study of the American poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and her work, Erickson amply justifies Eliot’s praise, demonstrating the poet’s ability to combine close observation with a worldview presentation that is at once intuitive, kaleidoscopic, and optimistic. Unfortunately, over the years the excellence and originality of Moore’s work has been overshadowed by its apparent inscrutability. Erickson examines the work of Marianne Moore in order to provide some consistently successful strategies for understanding her poetry.

The thesis is centered in a line from Moore’s poem, “Armor’s Undermining Modesty”:” What is more precise than precision? Illusion.” Erickson argues that Moore came to see herself humorously as “Imagnifico, a Wizard in Words,” a magician who used her conjuries to express a truth beyond reason, a truth described by the philosopher Henri Bergson as intuition, the highest stage of the evolution of human understanding. Is Erickson’s contention that Moore’s sense of magic is inextricably bound up in her own uniquely feminine epistemology, the tendency to place great value on intuition, and to find one’s own voice among collections of many voices.

This study demonstrates that Moore’s voice is arguably the strongest female voice in twentieth century American literature and her poetic voice could hold its own in the company of the best of the other modernists. Unlike many current scholars, Erickson examines closely the texts of Moore’s poems themselves, allowing the poet’s own voice to speak clearly. The study also explores Moore’s obsession with time, her preoccupation with the visual, her interest in the forms of Hebrew verse and her “susceptibility to happiness,” an outlook at some odds with the twentieth century’s fascination with the “romance of failure.”

While the book is scholarly in its intent and carefully documented, it is eminently readable and will be of interest of anyone fascinated by the mind of a brilliant twentieth century woman.

A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).

The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.

Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.

A wide-ranging study of the ideology of population control in early modern England

Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a growing notion of the value of a large populace created a sense of urgency about reproduction; accordingly, a wide array of English writers of the time voiced the need not merely to add more people but also to ensure that England had an abundance of the right kinds of people. This need, in turn, called for a variety of institutions to train—and thus make, through a kind of nonbiological procreation—pious, enterprising, and dutiful subjects. In Increase and Multiply, David Glimp examines previously unexplored links between this emergent demographic mentality and Renaissance literature.

Between the age of ten, when he translated Oscar Wilde, and the end of his life, when he prepared a Spanish version of the Prose Edda , Borges transformed the work of Poe, Kafka, Hesse, Kipling, Melville, Gide, Faulkner, Whitman, Woolf, Chesterton, and many others. In a multitude of essays, lectures, and interviews Borges analyzed the versions of others and developed an engaging view about translation. He held that a translation can improve an original, that contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid, and that an original can be unfaithful to a translation.

Borges's bold habits as translator and his views on translation had a decisive impact on his creative process. Translation is also a recurrent motif in Borges's stories. In "The Immortal," for example, a character who has lived for many centuries regains knowledge of poems he had authored, and almost forgotten, by way of modern translations. Many of Borges's fictions include actual or imagined translations, and some of his most important characters are translators. In "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote," Borges's character is a respected Symbolist poet, but also a translator, and the narrator insists that Menard's masterpiece-his "invisible work"-adds unsuspected layers of meaning to Cervantes's Don Quixote. George Steiner cites this short story as "the most acute, most concentrated commentary anyone has offered on the business of translation."

In an age where many discussions of translation revolve around the dichotomy faithful/unfaithful, this book will surprise and delight even Borges's closest readers and critics.

Artist Irene Rice Pereira was a significant figure in the New York art world of the 1930s and 1940s, who shared an interest in Jungianism with the better-known Abstract Expressionists and with various women artists and writers seeking "archetypal" imagery. Yet her artistic philosophy and innovative imagery elude easy classification with her artistic contemporaries. In consequence, her work is rarely included in studies of the period and is almost unknown to the general public. This first intellectual history of the artist and her work seeks to change that.

Karen A. Bearor thoroughly re-creates the artistic and philosophical milieu that nourished Pereira’s work. She examines the options available to Pereira as a woman artist in the first half of the twentieth century and explores how she used those options to contribute to the development of modernism in the United States. Bearor traces Pereira’s interest in the ideas of major thinkers of the period—among them, Spengler, Jung, Einstein, Cassirer, and Dewey—and shows how Pereira incorporated their ideas into her art. And she demonstrates how Pereira’s quest to understand something of the nature of ultimate reality led her from an early utopianism to a later interest in spiritualism and the occult.

This lively intellectual history amplifies our knowledge of a time of creative ferment in American art and society. It will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in the modernist period.

When Isaiah Rogers died in 1869, the Cincinnati Daily Times noted that “in his profession he was, perhaps, better known than any other person in the country.” Yet until now there has been no study that fully examines his remarkable, influential, and instructive career. Based largely on Rogers's own diary, this book tells his story and adds much to our understanding of architectural practice in the United States before the Civil War. 

In 1944 the distinguished historian Talbot Hamlin wrote of New York's Merchant Exchange (1836–42) that the building had “been so grandly conceived, so simply and directly planned, and so beautifully detailed . . . [that] the whole was welded inextricably into one powerful organic conception that shows Rogers as a great architect in the fullest sense of the word.” Rogers's Tremont House in Boston has been called the world's first modern hotel; it spawned many progeny, from his first Astor House in New York to his Burnet House in Cincinnati and beyond. 

Rogers designed buildings from Maine to Georgia and from Boston to Chicago to New Orleans, supervising their construction while traveling widely to procure materials and workmen for the job. He finished his career as Architect of the Treasury Department during the Civil War. In this richly illustrated volume, James F. O'Gorman offers a deft portrait of an energetic practitioner at a key time in architectural history, the period before the founding of the American Institute of Architects in 1857.

New perspectives on Christopher Isherwood as a searching and transnational writer

“Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places,” muses the narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet (1945), which he wrote in his adopted home of Los Angeles after years of dislocation and desperation. In Isherwood in Transit, James J.Berg and Chris Freeman bring together diverse Isherwood scholars to understand the challenges this writer faced as a consequence of his travel. 

Based on a conference at the Huntington Library, where Isherwood’s recently opened papers are held, Isherwood in Transit considers the writer not as an English, continental, or American writer but as a transnational one, whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections and engagements arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s.

Approaching Isherwood’s rootlessness and restlessness from various perspectives, these essays show that long after he made a new home in California and became an American citizen, Christopher Isherwood remained unsettled, although his wanderings became spiritual and personal rather than geographic.

Contributors: Barrie Jean Borich, DePaul U; Jamie Carr, Niagara U; Robert L. Caserio, Penn State U, University Park; Lisa Colletta, American U of Rome; Lois Cucullu, U of Minnesota; Jaime Harker, U of Mississippi; Carola M. Kaplan, California State U, Pomona; Calvin W. Keogh, Central European U, Budapest; Victor Marsh; Wendy Moffat, Dickinson College; Xenobe Purvis; Bidhan Roy, California State U, Los Angeles; Katharine Stevenson, U of Texas at Austin; Edmund White. 

Over the past two decades, profound changes in Israel opened its society to powerful outside forces and the dominance of global capitalism. As a result, the centrality of Zionism as an organizing ideology waned, prompting expressions of anxiety in Israel about the coming of a post-Zionist age. The fears about the end of Zionism were quelled, however, by the Palestinian uprising in 2000, which spurred at least a partial return to more traditional perceptions of homeland. Looking at Israeli literature of the late twentieth century, Yaron Peleg shows how a young, urban class of Israelis felt alienated from the Zionist values of their forebears, and how they adopted a form of escapist romanticism as a defiant response that replaced traditional nationalism.

One of the first books in English to identify the end of the post-Zionist era through inspired readings of Hebrew literature and popular media, Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas examines Israel's ambivalent relationship with Jewish nationalism at the end of the twentieth century.