Results by title

A new issue of the longstanding theatre journal, documenting conversations that traverse disciplinary boundaries

The essays in the thirty-first volume of Theatre Symposium traverse disciplinary boundaries to explore what constitutes the “popular” in theater and performance in an increasingly frenetic and mediated landscape. Amid the current resurgence of populist discourse and the enduring impact of popular culture, this volume explores what is considered popular, how that determination gets made, and who makes it. The answers to these questions shape the structures and systems of performance in an interaction that is reciprocal, intricate, and multifaceted. Productions often succeed or fail based on their ability to align with what is popular—sometimes productively, sometimes clumsily, sometimes brazenly, and sometimes tragically.

In our current moment, what constitutes the popular profoundly affects the real world politically, economically, and socially. Controversies about the electoral college system hinge on the primacy of the “popular” vote. Streaming services daily update lists of their most popular content and base future decisions on opaque measures of popularity. Social media platforms broadcast popular content across the globe, triggering new products, social activism, and political revolutions.

The contributors to this volume engage with a range of contemporary and historical examples and argue with clarity and acuity the interplay of performance and the popular. Theatre and performance deeply engage with the popular at every level—from audience response to box office revenue. The variety of methodologies and sites of inquiry showcased in this volume demonstrates the breadth and depth of the popular and the importance of such work to understanding our present moment onstage and off.

CONTRIBUTORS
Mysia Anderson / Chase Bringardner / Elizabeth M. Cizmar / Chelsea Curto / Janet M. Davis / Tom Fish / Kyla Kazuschyk / Sarah McCarroll / Eleanor Owicki / Sunny Stalter-Pace / Chelsea Taylor / Chris Woodworth

 

2005 — Best Book Translation Prize – New England Council of Latin American Studies

Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo were the two most influential and respected women writers of twentieth-century Latin America. Mistral, a plain, self-educated Chilean woman of the mountains who was a poet, journalist, and educator, became Latin America's first Nobel Laureate in 1945. Ocampo, a stunning Argentine woman of wealth, wrote hundreds of essays and founded the first-rate literary journal Sur. Though of very different backgrounds, their deep commitment to what they felt was "their" America forged a unique intellectual and emotional bond between them.

This collection of the previously unpublished correspondence between Mistral and Ocampo reveals the private side of two very public women. In these letters (as well as in essays that are included in an appendix), we see what Mistral and Ocampo thought about each other and about the intellectual and political atmosphere of their time (including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the dictatorships of Latin America) and particularly how they negotiated the complex issues of identity, nationality, and gender within their wide-ranging cultural connections to both the Americas and Europe.

This Music is the final, intimate work of celebrated Koyoonk’auwi (Concow) poet and essayist Janice Gould, completed posthumously by a collective of close friends and literary scholars.

Told through lyrical prose poems and personal photographs, this memoir traces Gould’s life as a queer/Two-Spirit California Native coming of age in the late 1960s, navigating family, identity, activism, and art. With reflections on her mixed-blood heritage, her experiences in lesbian feminist circles, and her journey as a poet and musician, Gould’s voice resonates with clarity, tenderness, and fierce honesty.

The book opens with a foreword by Joy Harjo and an introduction from the editorial collective, including an essay by Gould’s spouse, Marie-Elise Wheatwind, framing the memoir as both a literary achievement and a loving tribute.

This Music is a vital contribution to Indigenous and LGBTQ+ literatures, offering readers a rare and powerful account of gender, sexuality, and Native identity in mid-century and contemporary America. As the one hundredth volume in the Sun Tracks series, this work honors Gould’s legacy while expanding the canon of poetic memoir. Ideal for readers of poetry, memoir, and Indigenous literature, this book will resonate deeply with scholars, students, and anyone drawn to stories of resilience, creativity, and the enduring power of memory.

This volume brings together all of the known poetry and a selection of correspondence by an enormously talented but underappreciated poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Cousin of novelist Dorothy West and friend of Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson (1905–1995) first gained literary prominence when James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost selected three of her poems for prizes in a 1926 competition. During the late 1920s and early 1930s her poetry appeared in various small magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Quill, Palms, Opportunity, and Harlem. In 1933 Johnson married, and two years later her last published poem, “Let Me Sing My Song,” appeared in Challenge, the journal West had founded to revive the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. 

In his well-researched introduction, Verner D. Mitchell reconstructs Johnson's life, the details of which have long been veiled from public view, and places her in the context of a vital literary tradition. In addition to discussing her relationship with West, Hurston, and other black women writers, he explores the distinctive, at times radical, qualities of her work. Ever willing to defy the genteel conventions that governed women's writing, Johnson wrote poems on erotic themes and engaged the aesthetic, gender, and racial politics of her time. 

Cheryl A. Wall's foreword also celebrates Johnson's talent, particularly the ease with which she moved among various verse forms—from the rigor of the sonnet to the improvisational creativity of free black vernacular. “An unexpected and most welcome gift,” This Waiting for Love, Wall writes, is “an enduring tribute” to “the vibrant poetry of Helene Johnson.”

A collection of reminiscences captures the private life of a great American writer.

Thomas Wolfe’s life may seem to be an open book. A life that, after all, was the source for his best-known works, including the novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, as well as his numerous short stories and dramas. Since his death in 1938, scholars and admirers of Wolfe have relied largely on these texts to understand the man himself.

Thomas Wolfe Remembered provides something new: a rich, multifaceted portrait painted by those who knew him (casually or intimately), loved him (or didn’t), and saw, heard, and experienced the literary (and literal) giant. This volume gathers in one place for the first time dozens of reminiscences by friends, family members, colleagues, and casual acquaintances, adding color and fine details to the self-portrait the author created in his novels.

Wolfe found plenty to challenge and frustrate him throughout his life, from his boyhood in Asheville, North Carolina, to his education at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, through his time in New York and Europe, his travels through the American West, and his death in Baltimore. He experienced two distracted parents in a loveless marriage, the premature death of a beloved brother, a minor stutter, and the difficulties of controlling a mercurial temper. Yet Wolfe’s exuberance, perceptiveness, memory, and compulsion to record virtually all that he experienced made for an extravagance of material that sometimes angered the people whose lives he used as source material.

Editors Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery have collected dozens of remembrances, many unpublished or long forgotten, including pieces from Julia Wolfe, Margaret Roberts, Frederick Koch, Maxwell Perkins, Elizabeth Nowell, Edward Aswell, and Martha Dodd. Some are endearing, others are disturbing, and many are comical. All provide glimpses into the vibrant, haunted, boyish, paranoid, disheveled, courteous, captivating, infuriating, and altogether fascinating giant who was Thomas Wolfe.

A ranging, erudite, and intimate examination of the nature of knowledge, by a thinker and creator who defies categorization.

Attention is in short supply and high demand. But when we bring our minds and time and senses to something—an idea, an object, another person—we tap into a human capacity for observation, patience, candor, and presence. Look long enough, and we can reliably catch a bright flash, a shift in the light, even a dawning.

In Till the Light Leaps, historian of science D. Graham Burnett explores the questions that have been major drivers of his intellectual life: How do we know what we know? And how are we changed by that effort? Written during a period of radical, collective, and creative experimentation with attention, the twenty-six essays collected here span topics like technology, science, art, and religion. Together, they comprise a sustained reflection on the relationship between empirical matters and the shiver-work of the human spirit. A brief history of spectroscopy offers an occasion to consider the solemn power of fire, as well as the righteous lessons of a childhood science experiment gone wrong. Skywriting invokes military might, but also the expressionistic bravura of a solo aeronaut, Art Smith. The Greek ritual of throwing plant matter in celebration is a thread connecting animal sacrifice, confetti production, and capitalist excess. In the final, previously unpublished essay, Galway Kinnell’s 1980 poem “Saint Francis and the Sow” becomes a heroic call to love and an allegory of attention in its richest sense.

Till the Light Leaps, a reference to the writings of Simone Weil, advises us to look at something “until the light leaps,” whether it yields a wink or an illumination. Burnett models the work—and the pleasure—of staying present with the world, and his essays test what science can offer, even as they feel for what it cannot.

To Go Into the Words is the latest book of critical prose from renowned poet and scholar of Jewish literature Norman Finkelstein. Through a rigorous examination of poets such as William Bronk, Helen Adam, and Nathaniel Mackey, the book engages the contemporary poetic fascination with transcendence through the radical delight with language. By opening up a given poem, Finkelstein seeks the “gnosis” or insight of what it contains so that other readers can understand and appreciate the works even more.

WINNER OF THE LYMAN BOOK AWARD FOR MARITIME AND NAVAL SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ENVIRONMENT

Argues that the US Navy’s commitment to high-steam propulsion for its World War II fleet was a tactical, technological, and bureaucratic failure

In Too Far on a Whim, Tyler A. Pitrof presents a high-spirited revision of the US Navy’s commitment to high-steam propulsion systems, the mainstay of its World War II fleets. Pitrof’s research persuasively demonstrates that in its war against the Imperial Japanese Navy, the US Navy succeeded despite its high-steam propulsion systems rather than because of them.

War with an aggressive Japan and a resurgent Germany loomed in the dark days of the late 1930s. Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen Sr., head of the US Navy’s Bureau of Engineering, advanced a radical vision: a new fleet based on high-steam propulsion, a novel technology that promised high speeds with smaller engines and better fuel efficiency. High-steam engines had drawbacks—smaller operational ranges and maintenance issues. Nevertheless, trusting its engineers to resolve these issues, the US Navy put high-steam propulsion at the heart of its warship design from 1938 to 1945.

The official record of high-steam technology’s subsequent performance has relied heavily on Bowen’s own memoir, in which he painted high-steam innovation in heroic colors. Pitrof’s empirical review of primary sources such as ship’s maintenance records, however, illuminates the opposite—that the heroism lay in the ability of American seamen to improvise solutions to keep these difficult engines running.

Pitrof artfully explains engineering concepts in layman’s terms and provides an account that extends far beyond technology and into matters of naval hierarchies and bureaucracy, strategic theory, and ego. He offers a cautionary tale—as relevant to any endeavor as it is to military undertakings—about how failures arise when technical experts lack managers who understand their work. Admiral Bowen wielded excessive power because no one else in the US Navy knew enough to countermand him.

Compulsively readable, Too Far on a Whim is a landmark for those interested in naval history and technology but also for readers interested in the interplay between innovation, decision-making, and engineering.
 

This captivating collection of translated short works by José López Portillo y Rojas, one of Mexico’s most significant literary figures, explores themes of social frustration, loss, and heartache in late-nineteenth-century Mexico.

Torment and Tequila in Belle Epoque Mexico is the first English-language collection of selected fiction by the influential Mexican author and political figure José López Portillo y Rojas (1850–1923). His distinguished career spanned the late nineteenth century to the tumultuous years of the Mexican Revolution.

López Portillo y Rojas’s prose is characterized by rich vocabulary and fluid progression, offering readers moments of deep reflection. The stories boast finely drawn characters and evocative settings, including that of the author’s native Jalisco. He adeptly addresses the grand issues of Porfirian times, seamlessly blending social and personal themes of suffering, ambition, desire, and betrayal, and anchors his stories in the realities of human experience.

Three masterfully translated short stories and one novella make up the collection, beginning with “The Lottery Ticket,” a critique of social hypocrisy that follows a dreamer whose fortunes slip through his fingers at the hands of his own family. “The Mirror” explores the eerie depths of grief and guilt, echoing the gothic brilliance of Edgar Allan Poe. “Nieves” is a gripping novella of love and power in which a young woman’s fate becomes entangled in a decaying estate and a brewing rebellion. “The Bracelet,” examines the tragic weight of the past, as a locked piece of jewelry seals the fate of an engaged couple. These translations offer an unforgettable glimpse into one of Mexico’s most brilliant minds and restore López Portillo y Rojas to his rightful place in Mexican literary history.

In Trajectories, poet, translator, human rights advocate, and world traveler Carolyne Wright maps her poetic path in the crossing of cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries. From her origins in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest through Latin America (Chile, Brazil) and South Asia (India, Bangladesh) through languages spoken in these regions (Spanish, Portuguese, and Bengali), Wright recalls and relives the poetic trajectory as well as the seeming tangents that one poet’s relatively uncommon life has taken. She pays tribute to poetic mentors of the “Northwest School,” to Bengali and Chilean women poets, to the poetry and music of Brazil, and to poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath.

Throughout her essays and interviews and across a wide range of literary interests, Wright explores connections between family and national history, intersections of personal and public spheres, and the poetics of the era in which she moves. She connects lyricism to social engagement, witnessing contemporary and historical issues while remaining committed to the heightened, musical language of lyric poetry. Both personal and political, a compelling story and a work of criticism, Trajectories seeks essential insights into poetry as a path of discovery across the cartography of the human heart. Wright offers these experiences and insights as a map for readers who wish to share the journey.

The mauve life and times of Edmund Gosse glow warmly in these letters, delightful to even the most casual reader, engrossing to one with an interest in the distinguished correspondents or in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras.

An obscure figure today to all but literary connoisseurs, Gosse was, in his day, a near giant in both England and the United States. Max Beerbohm, that discriminating man, in a mural of prominent figures who were also his friends, sketched Edmund Gosse large among George Bernard Shaw, John Masefield, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, and Lytton Strachey.

This volume consists primarily of a selection of the letters exchanged between Gosse and a number of American writers, notably William Dean Howells, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Watson Gilder, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. The letters, most of them previously unpublished, contain much of biographical and general historical interest, but the main theme of the book is the exploration of Anglo-American literary relations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth.

The letters that passed between Gosse and Stedman provide valuable evidence for the study of literary taste on the two sides of the Atlantic and also show how each man sought to enhance the other's transatlantic reputation; the correspondence between Gosse and Gilder, particularly during the period when Gosse was London editor of Gilder's Century magazine, is especially revealing of cultural attitudes and antagonisms. A central thread is provided by the warm and long-sustained friendship between Gosse and Howells, the leading American man of letters of his day.

The long introduction to the book deals with such topics as Gosse's American reputation, his immensely successful visit to the United States in the winter of 1884–1885 (based on the manuscript diary that Gosse kept during the visit), and his American friendships, with particular attention to the relationship with Howells. The thoroughness and vitality of the annotation are extremely effective in familiarizing the reader with the people and events in the book.