The Word, Spring 2017-18 : simplebooklet.com
Search
About
Contact
Collection
Buy
Share
Download
Spring 2018 Volume 18 Issue 2 3 Departmental Prize Winners 3 Hoopes Prize Winners 4 Post Graduation Plans 10 Senior Thesis Excerpts 30 We Remember Barbara Lewalski 34 Spring Term Scrapbook
CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 2018 Charlotte Anrig Emeline Atwood Bonnie Bennett Conor Bent Aisha Bhoori Nathaniel Brodsky Lindsay Bu Deirdre Carney Lawrence Cherkasov Grazie Christie Mitchell Edwards Allison Freiwald Robin Gewehr Catherine Gildea Lucas Giveen Shaun Gohel Madison Gonzalez Cleo Harrington Laura Hatt Miles Hewitt Rob Hopkirk Daniel Hughes Consuelo Hylton Camille Jacobson Robiny Jamerson Katherine Jung Electra Lang Brittany Ledford Juliet Lewis George Li Bronte Lim Nina van Loon Brieanna Martin Claudia Martinez Laurel McCaull Mario Menendez Grace Murphy Maeva O Brien Emily Ott Leon Pan Michelle Raji Miranda Ryshawy Nora Sagal Natasha Sarna Duncan Saum Eli Schleicher Mary Beth Schleicher Peter Scott Hansen Shi Nathan Siegelaub Rachel Silverstein Olivia Startup Martine Thomas Andrew Wilcox Curtis Wu Aziz Yakub 2 Concentrators Receive Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize Emeline Atwood for her submission entitled The Strays supervised and nominated by Mr Bret Johnston Maeva O Brien for her submission entitled Present Absence History Literature and Hiroshima in Cat s Cradle and Ceremony supervised and nominated by Professor Ju Yon Kim Departmental Prizes Boston Ruskin Prize Emma Adler G1 Unquiet Meals On Eating Beauty Helen Choate Bell Prize Essay Thomas Dolinger G3 Words are here as pulse Claudia Rankine and The Fate of the Lyric Body Winthrop Sargent Prize Bailey Sincox G2 The Winter s Tale as Revenge Comedy Robiny Jamerson 18 Leon Pan 18 Le Baron Russell Briggs Grant for Continued Critical Literary Studies Rob Hopkirk 18 Natasha Sarna 18 1 Place Chloe Brooks 19 Academy of American Poets Prize Cyrilly Abels Short Story Prize Le Baron Russell Briggs Honors Thesis Prize in English st Martine Thomas 18 The Sky Tonight Martine Thomas 18 Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize Photo Credit Harvard University Harvard University Archives W282749_1 Edward Eager Memorial Fund Prize Poetry Bonnie Bennett 18 Aisha Bhoori 18 Acha Baba Boylston Prize for Elocution Joan Gray Untermyer Poetry Prize 2 Ashley Gong 20 Beneath The Thomas Wood Award in Journalism Edward Eager Grant for Continued Studies in Creative Writing Congratulations to them all Roger Conant Hatch Prizes For Lyric Poetry Miles Hewitt 18 On first seeing the moon in Laurel Canyon Fiction 2nd Place Sabrina Li 18 Slurp and spit and suck Charles Edmund Horman Prize Max Lesser 19 Poetry Harvard Monthly Prize Laurel McCaull 18 Cherline Bazile 18 Brieanna Martin 18 Le Baron Russell Briggs Traveling Prizes Emmie Atwood 18 Cherline Bazile 18 Bonnie Bennett 18 Aisha Bhoori 18 Miles Hewitt 18 Bronte Lim 18 Martine Thomas 18 3
CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 2018 Charlotte Anrig Emeline Atwood Bonnie Bennett Conor Bent Aisha Bhoori Nathaniel Brodsky Lindsay Bu Deirdre Carney Lawrence Cherkasov Grazie Christie Mitchell Edwards Allison Freiwald Robin Gewehr Catherine Gildea Lucas Giveen Shaun Gohel Madison Gonzalez Cleo Harrington Laura Hatt Miles Hewitt Rob Hopkirk Daniel Hughes Consuelo Hylton Camille Jacobson Robiny Jamerson Katherine Jung Electra Lang Brittany Ledford Juliet Lewis George Li Bronte Lim Nina van Loon Brieanna Martin Claudia Martinez Laurel McCaull Mario Menendez Grace Murphy Maeva O Brien Emily Ott Leon Pan Michelle Raji Miranda Ryshawy Nora Sagal Natasha Sarna Duncan Saum Eli Schleicher Mary Beth Schleicher Peter Scott Hansen Shi Nathan Siegelaub Rachel Silverstein Olivia Startup Martine Thomas Andrew Wilcox Curtis Wu Aziz Yakub 2 Concentrators Receive Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize Emeline Atwood for her submission entitled The Strays supervised and nominated by Mr Bret Johnston Maeva O Brien for her submission entitled Present Absence History Literature and Hiroshima in Cat s Cradle and Ceremony supervised and nominated by Professor Ju Yon Kim Departmental Prizes Boston Ruskin Prize Emma Adler G1 Unquiet Meals On Eating Beauty Helen Choate Bell Prize Essay Thomas Dolinger G3 Words are here as pulse Claudia Rankine and The Fate of the Lyric Body Winthrop Sargent Prize Bailey Sincox G2 The Winter s Tale as Revenge Comedy Robiny Jamerson 18 Leon Pan 18 Le Baron Russell Briggs Grant for Continued Critical Literary Studies Rob Hopkirk 18 Natasha Sarna 18 1 Place Chloe Brooks 19 Academy of American Poets Prize Cyrilly Abels Short Story Prize Le Baron Russell Briggs Honors Thesis Prize in English st Martine Thomas 18 The Sky Tonight Martine Thomas 18 Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize Photo Credit Harvard University Harvard University Archives W282749_1 Edward Eager Memorial Fund Prize Poetry Bonnie Bennett 18 Aisha Bhoori 18 Acha Baba Boylston Prize for Elocution Joan Gray Untermyer Poetry Prize 2 Ashley Gong 20 Beneath The Thomas Wood Award in Journalism Edward Eager Grant for Continued Studies in Creative Writing Congratulations to them all Roger Conant Hatch Prizes For Lyric Poetry Miles Hewitt 18 On first seeing the moon in Laurel Canyon Fiction 2nd Place Sabrina Li 18 Slurp and spit and suck Charles Edmund Horman Prize Max Lesser 19 Poetry Harvard Monthly Prize Laurel McCaull 18 Cherline Bazile 18 Brieanna Martin 18 Le Baron Russell Briggs Traveling Prizes Emmie Atwood 18 Cherline Bazile 18 Bonnie Bennett 18 Aisha Bhoori 18 Miles Hewitt 18 Bronte Lim 18 Martine Thomas 18 3
Post Graduation Plans Emmie Atwood is doing the Sheldon Post Graduate Fellowship through the Harvard Fellowship Office It allows for unrestricted travel abroad for one year She will travel to a variety of places including Easter Island South Korea Australia and Norway to do research for a book she is writing Grazie Christie will be starting at Oxford in the fall undertaking a Masters in Global Governance and Diplomacy She hopes to focus on cultural governance so that she can continue to engage with the ideas that have meant so much to her throughout her years in the Department of English As for the summer she hopes to work on the novella she completed for her creative senior thesis Robert Hopkirk will be lucky enough to spend Lindsay Bu is heading back home to NYC to work at an artificial intelligence tech startup called HyperScience The company provides software to automate office work for major enterprises in the financial government and insurance industries Lindsay will be working in sales and marketing and be responsible for finding new clients that are interested in HyperScience s products and figuring out how to best deploy the software Before starting work Lindsay is hoping to travel for a month perhaps on a road trip with some friends or on a short international trip Most importantly Lindsay is looking forward to living in a new and cozy apartment with her two roommates who are also fellow Harvard grads 4 a few final months in Cambridge as a returning proctor for the Harvard Summer School Now that he is completing his own undergraduate journey he is particularly looking forward to working with the high school seniors as they embark on their own paths through higher education In August he will move to New Haven to begin a two year master s degree program in Religion and Literature Although he is thrilled to be entering the interdisciplinary communities at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music he knows that he could never have aspired to join them without first benefiting from the friendship and wisdom of so many at Harvard and in particular at the Barker Center 5
Post Graduation Plans Emmie Atwood is doing the Sheldon Post Graduate Fellowship through the Harvard Fellowship Office It allows for unrestricted travel abroad for one year She will travel to a variety of places including Easter Island South Korea Australia and Norway to do research for a book she is writing Grazie Christie will be starting at Oxford in the fall undertaking a Masters in Global Governance and Diplomacy She hopes to focus on cultural governance so that she can continue to engage with the ideas that have meant so much to her throughout her years in the Department of English As for the summer she hopes to work on the novella she completed for her creative senior thesis Robert Hopkirk will be lucky enough to spend Lindsay Bu is heading back home to NYC to work at an artificial intelligence tech startup called HyperScience The company provides software to automate office work for major enterprises in the financial government and insurance industries Lindsay will be working in sales and marketing and be responsible for finding new clients that are interested in HyperScience s products and figuring out how to best deploy the software Before starting work Lindsay is hoping to travel for a month perhaps on a road trip with some friends or on a short international trip Most importantly Lindsay is looking forward to living in a new and cozy apartment with her two roommates who are also fellow Harvard grads 4 a few final months in Cambridge as a returning proctor for the Harvard Summer School Now that he is completing his own undergraduate journey he is particularly looking forward to working with the high school seniors as they embark on their own paths through higher education In August he will move to New Haven to begin a two year master s degree program in Religion and Literature Although he is thrilled to be entering the interdisciplinary communities at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music he knows that he could never have aspired to join them without first benefiting from the friendship and wisdom of so many at Harvard and in particular at the Barker Center 5
Laurel McCaull will be spending the next year in Madrid Spain on a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship She plans to write about her personal experience of loss and recovery against the backdrop of a country that has experienced such devastating economic loss with the idea that grief is universal and can be used to connect to others rather than isolate oneself from the world Maeva O Brien has joined the Harvard Teacher Fellows program through the Harvard Graduate School of Education and will spend the next year pursuing her Ed M and teaching 9th grade English at Leadership Public Schools in Hayward California She hopes to use her knowledge of English literature and appreciation for the power of reading and writing to promote educational equity and empower her students She can t wait to share her love for literature and for learning with the next generation 6 Jake Scott will enter the University of Pennsylvania Teaching Residency Program at Gilman School At Gilman a private all boys day school in Baltimore Maryland he will assist an experienced mentor teacher in learning to teach high school English In addition to his role in the classroom he will use what he has learned as a member of the Harvard Men s Lacrosse Team to coach the Gilman Boy s Lacrosse Team He will simultaneously pursue a master s degree in education at the University of Pennsylvania Most of the course work is completed online but various weekends and summer attendance will allow him to return to his hometown just outside Philadelphia He looks forward to the next chapter of his life a combination of all that he is passionate about working with kids studying English and coaching lacrosse and he is extremely grateful for the preparation and time that the Harvard English Department has provided him for four incredible years 7
Laurel McCaull will be spending the next year in Madrid Spain on a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship She plans to write about her personal experience of loss and recovery against the backdrop of a country that has experienced such devastating economic loss with the idea that grief is universal and can be used to connect to others rather than isolate oneself from the world Maeva O Brien has joined the Harvard Teacher Fellows program through the Harvard Graduate School of Education and will spend the next year pursuing her Ed M and teaching 9th grade English at Leadership Public Schools in Hayward California She hopes to use her knowledge of English literature and appreciation for the power of reading and writing to promote educational equity and empower her students She can t wait to share her love for literature and for learning with the next generation 6 Jake Scott will enter the University of Pennsylvania Teaching Residency Program at Gilman School At Gilman a private all boys day school in Baltimore Maryland he will assist an experienced mentor teacher in learning to teach high school English In addition to his role in the classroom he will use what he has learned as a member of the Harvard Men s Lacrosse Team to coach the Gilman Boy s Lacrosse Team He will simultaneously pursue a master s degree in education at the University of Pennsylvania Most of the course work is completed online but various weekends and summer attendance will allow him to return to his hometown just outside Philadelphia He looks forward to the next chapter of his life a combination of all that he is passionate about working with kids studying English and coaching lacrosse and he is extremely grateful for the preparation and time that the Harvard English Department has provided him for four incredible years 7
Hansen Shi will spend a month traveling through Europe Berlin Prague Vienna and Asia Shenzhen Hong Kong Seoul sightseeing with friends visiting family and working on the novel manuscript called The Expat that he submitted for his senior thesis In July he will relocate to San Francisco and start working as a management consultant with Bain Co At Bain he hopes to get some exposure to the media entertainment and investment industries as potential future career destinations Between traveling for work and exploring the Bay Area he will finish the novel hopefully by the end of the year Curtis Wu will be teaching 10th grade English in Dallas TX as part of the Harvard Teacher Fellows He remembers that in 10th grade he was skeptical of the seriousness and usefulness of reading literature so he is looking forward to being on the receiving end of that attitude He is also looking forward to eating some quality barbecue 8 9
Hansen Shi will spend a month traveling through Europe Berlin Prague Vienna and Asia Shenzhen Hong Kong Seoul sightseeing with friends visiting family and working on the novel manuscript called The Expat that he submitted for his senior thesis In July he will relocate to San Francisco and start working as a management consultant with Bain Co At Bain he hopes to get some exposure to the media entertainment and investment industries as potential future career destinations Between traveling for work and exploring the Bay Area he will finish the novel hopefully by the end of the year Curtis Wu will be teaching 10th grade English in Dallas TX as part of the Harvard Teacher Fellows He remembers that in 10th grade he was skeptical of the seriousness and usefulness of reading literature so he is looking forward to being on the receiving end of that attitude He is also looking forward to eating some quality barbecue 8 9
Senior Thesis Excerpts Our Undergraduate Honors Program supports students who want to do ambitious scholarly critical or creative work involving literature in English Here are a few excerpts from this year s submitted senior theses From The Strays Fiction Thesis by Emmie Atwood 1 Lucille went missing around the same time the animals came to our town Our town was small and just outside the city All the roads shared a strange but pleasing symmetry with stop signs at every corner The houses were equally spaced and unless you lived on the hill equally sized Black lampposts craned over the sides of the streets standing opposite each other checkering the sidewalk with black unlit patches Between the lampposts the town staggered poplar trees and in the colder months their leafless shadows spidered over the curb Our neighborhood used to be full of other trees too silver ash and maples horsechestnuts and dogwoods but lately the land had started balding Workers had come across the trolley tracks wearing their neon vests and yellow hats against the muted browns of fall and put up apartment complexes Sunrise Ventures crammed a new community with red doored houses and pedicured lawns where the woods behind the school used to be At Christmas those properties all hung the same squinting blindingly blue eco friendly lights making the homes even harder to look at The new houses offset our town center which was now steeping in age All the awnings were turning brown at the edges even the brand new pink one in front of the deli Because we were so close to the city there wasn t a whole lot in our town Lucille and I lived three blocks away from each other and a few blocks up from the trolley stop the Mufflers Pipes Garage and the half finished warehouse that used to be an ambulance station The town had also recently built a bike path along the trolley line revealing a muddy river that the Boxelder trees used to 10 shield The dark brick buildings along the water once were part of a chocolate factory but now were residential Three old smoke stacks rose above them They weren t operating anymore but when the rain clouds drooped in the right way the stacks sometimes looked alive again billowing Our town kissed the city line Half the Citgo Station belonged to the city and half was ours We were about twenty minutes to the city center by train and only ten minutes north on the freeway by car That s why it was so strange one morning when I went outside to roll up the trash bins and a large buck stood in our driveway staring at the stone wall Velvet wilted from his horns the sun catching in a crown around his shoulders His horns poked into the blush sky like twin steeples And then there were the sightings of the female black bear in the parking lot behind the deli The red tailed hawk with the broken neck on the telephone wire by the school Even in the brightest parts of the day skunks stuck their noses in garbage pails At night the sidewalks blinked at you as you drove by with their dozens of red eyes The local newspaper said this sudden increase in wild animals had to do with a unique combination of things over the summer our area had hit a record breaking dryness and a forest fire had burned through hundreds of acres west of us It also just so happened that the government was in the process of unprotecting a lot of protected land so there was an increase in the selling and subdividing of property In the fall the neighbors next door cut down the trees to prepare the lot for construction in the spring Red leaves still filled the field for several weeks after and the sight of them spread eagle on the ground twisted my stomach There were two deer that moved through that field most mornings and if I woke early enough from my bathroom window I could watch their skin shiver in the cold light The increase in deer through our town was the most noticeable Deer leapt over the fence into the graveyard as frequently as squirrels slipping through the thin white birches behind our houses We saw their shadows trembling at night in the bushes There was even a police report that a deer had sprinted through the hall of an urgent care clinic in Chester More and more people were filing for hunting licenses to get rid of them When the animal sightings started the local newspaper catalogued each one in a column noting them at first with a tone of glee and celebration and then later as the animals became more and more abundant with a tone of muted curiosity a fear of encroachment and finally alarm In the middle of the day a neighbor stormed from his porch into his front yard banging two pots together at a mother skunk and her three skinny kittens bellowing This is my yard My yard The animal sightings felt as forbidding as an onset of unusual symptoms Like that red haired girl in the eighth grade whose right knee started to swell then her right eye and next a fever She told me at lunch that she kept feeling the shadow of a headache sweep through her brain until it got unbearable congealing into something solid and throbbing Eventually she was diagnosed with Lyme I had heard of the disease only because Lucille s old dog had limped from it for years But it proved to be even nastier for the girl than I had imagined In math class paramedics escorted Emily out of the room because she kept screaming that the Lyme was attacking her brain Teachers shortened our recess time and made us check our ankles every day before the start of class It also seemed like every day more and more dead animals were smeared on the side of the road The outdoor housecats were all getting picked apart by fisher cats We d find their skulls in the grass skin flapping off the forehead with patches of blood sodden fur and chewed out eyes Lucille claimed a skull that she found in the schoolyard and cleaned it in the kitchen sink then hung it on a hook in her room It was about the size of a softball but flatter She let me stick my finger through its gaping eye sockets Neighbors stuck signs up on stop signs and lampposts about their lost cats and small dogs and in the rain storms which finally came in droves that fall the papers dripped and tore and flapped wetly in the gutters Whenever I saw the signs I couldn t stop seeing Lucille s skull in place of whatever tabby cat s face peered out 11
Senior Thesis Excerpts Our Undergraduate Honors Program supports students who want to do ambitious scholarly critical or creative work involving literature in English Here are a few excerpts from this year s submitted senior theses From The Strays Fiction Thesis by Emmie Atwood 1 Lucille went missing around the same time the animals came to our town Our town was small and just outside the city All the roads shared a strange but pleasing symmetry with stop signs at every corner The houses were equally spaced and unless you lived on the hill equally sized Black lampposts craned over the sides of the streets standing opposite each other checkering the sidewalk with black unlit patches Between the lampposts the town staggered poplar trees and in the colder months their leafless shadows spidered over the curb Our neighborhood used to be full of other trees too silver ash and maples horsechestnuts and dogwoods but lately the land had started balding Workers had come across the trolley tracks wearing their neon vests and yellow hats against the muted browns of fall and put up apartment complexes Sunrise Ventures crammed a new community with red doored houses and pedicured lawns where the woods behind the school used to be At Christmas those properties all hung the same squinting blindingly blue eco friendly lights making the homes even harder to look at The new houses offset our town center which was now steeping in age All the awnings were turning brown at the edges even the brand new pink one in front of the deli Because we were so close to the city there wasn t a whole lot in our town Lucille and I lived three blocks away from each other and a few blocks up from the trolley stop the Mufflers Pipes Garage and the half finished warehouse that used to be an ambulance station The town had also recently built a bike path along the trolley line revealing a muddy river that the Boxelder trees used to 10 shield The dark brick buildings along the water once were part of a chocolate factory but now were residential Three old smoke stacks rose above them They weren t operating anymore but when the rain clouds drooped in the right way the stacks sometimes looked alive again billowing Our town kissed the city line Half the Citgo Station belonged to the city and half was ours We were about twenty minutes to the city center by train and only ten minutes north on the freeway by car That s why it was so strange one morning when I went outside to roll up the trash bins and a large buck stood in our driveway staring at the stone wall Velvet wilted from his horns the sun catching in a crown around his shoulders His horns poked into the blush sky like twin steeples And then there were the sightings of the female black bear in the parking lot behind the deli The red tailed hawk with the broken neck on the telephone wire by the school Even in the brightest parts of the day skunks stuck their noses in garbage pails At night the sidewalks blinked at you as you drove by with their dozens of red eyes The local newspaper said this sudden increase in wild animals had to do with a unique combination of things over the summer our area had hit a record breaking dryness and a forest fire had burned through hundreds of acres west of us It also just so happened that the government was in the process of unprotecting a lot of protected land so there was an increase in the selling and subdividing of property In the fall the neighbors next door cut down the trees to prepare the lot for construction in the spring Red leaves still filled the field for several weeks after and the sight of them spread eagle on the ground twisted my stomach There were two deer that moved through that field most mornings and if I woke early enough from my bathroom window I could watch their skin shiver in the cold light The increase in deer through our town was the most noticeable Deer leapt over the fence into the graveyard as frequently as squirrels slipping through the thin white birches behind our houses We saw their shadows trembling at night in the bushes There was even a police report that a deer had sprinted through the hall of an urgent care clinic in Chester More and more people were filing for hunting licenses to get rid of them When the animal sightings started the local newspaper catalogued each one in a column noting them at first with a tone of glee and celebration and then later as the animals became more and more abundant with a tone of muted curiosity a fear of encroachment and finally alarm In the middle of the day a neighbor stormed from his porch into his front yard banging two pots together at a mother skunk and her three skinny kittens bellowing This is my yard My yard The animal sightings felt as forbidding as an onset of unusual symptoms Like that red haired girl in the eighth grade whose right knee started to swell then her right eye and next a fever She told me at lunch that she kept feeling the shadow of a headache sweep through her brain until it got unbearable congealing into something solid and throbbing Eventually she was diagnosed with Lyme I had heard of the disease only because Lucille s old dog had limped from it for years But it proved to be even nastier for the girl than I had imagined In math class paramedics escorted Emily out of the room because she kept screaming that the Lyme was attacking her brain Teachers shortened our recess time and made us check our ankles every day before the start of class It also seemed like every day more and more dead animals were smeared on the side of the road The outdoor housecats were all getting picked apart by fisher cats We d find their skulls in the grass skin flapping off the forehead with patches of blood sodden fur and chewed out eyes Lucille claimed a skull that she found in the schoolyard and cleaned it in the kitchen sink then hung it on a hook in her room It was about the size of a softball but flatter She let me stick my finger through its gaping eye sockets Neighbors stuck signs up on stop signs and lampposts about their lost cats and small dogs and in the rain storms which finally came in droves that fall the papers dripped and tore and flapped wetly in the gutters Whenever I saw the signs I couldn t stop seeing Lucille s skull in place of whatever tabby cat s face peered out 11
Chapter 3 from The Power of the Performative Shift Critical Thesis by Mitchell Edwards In the first chapter of this thesis I discussed the role of constative and performative language in Infinite Jest viewed through a lens of community building and social reconstruction This sociolinguistic concept is of much use in analyzing 1984 as well and appropriate for understanding the protean unsure relationship between language and power in both texts In an informative but generous reading of Orwellian linguistics Paul Chilton theorizes that 1984 s Newspeak exemplifies most closely neither a dialect or distinctive language of its own but a sublanguage as defined by linguists Kitteridge and Lehrberger Chilton 135 Sublanguages are artificial creations contrasted with natural languages Sublanguages have a controlled and theoretically limited vocabulary created only to describe a specific and limited slice of the world and experience Chilton 136 In making this comparison Chilton compares Newspeak to one of English s most recognizable sublanguages legal language Newspeak resembles the legal sublanguage s emphasis on language as performance legal speech acts being perhaps the most important terms in that sublanguage Chilton s chosen example is the exclamation Guilty in a court of law 137 According to Chilton Newspeak reflects a similar centrality of the speech act and its implicit power his example here is the declaration that 2 2 5 because the Party says so 137 Chilton s example of this performative speech act in 1984 is only one of many all of which show a mechanic important to language in Orwell s novel the exertion of power through linguistic means Chilton observes that the relationship between constative and performative language is often ambiguous and highly contextual 137 Statements that may be purely constative in some contexts e g 2 2 5 is normally just a positive if verifiably false statement can be considered performative in others stating that equation in 1984 s Oceania signals submission to the Party and to orthodoxy Beyond brute force beyond camps and bombs and clubs and guns the Party s true strength is illustrated by its manipulation of constative and performative language Orwell 12 energizes the Party with the power to transmute the constative to the performative to give stipulative force to statements Chilton 137 Orwell portrays overwhelming power as the catalyst in this linguistic alchemy as Winston Smith s performative language is prompted by the exertion of state power and is a linguistic admission of deferment to that power Performative language does not limit itself to just speech acts as one can see in the last line of Orwell s novel Free indirect discourse allows Orwell to manifest this linguistic control in the narration itself as Winston s thoughts direct the novel s final statement He loved Big Brother Nineteen 298 Here the Party s power extends not only to Winston s thoughts his language or the language of the state Orwell uses this literary device to admit linguistic manipulation into the narrative sphere to infect the text itself and allow the fictional state a foothold in an artifact of the real I choose to call this crucial moment of transformation to performative language the performative shift and recognition of its presence and importance as an exploration of language power dynamics in both Orwell and Wallace further illuminates our comparative understanding of the two Orwell portrays the performative shift as an action forced by an extreme concentration of power power vested in the totalitarian state To Orwell the forced performative shift is the ultimate symbol of totalitarian oppression The concept weaves together nearly all the author s well documented fears and enemies linguistic manipulation enforced political orthodoxy arbitrary state sanctioned violence upon man and soul both The aspects of totalitarianism thought to be its defining traits the union of external coercion and internal psychological domination allow this hegemony over performative language in Orwell s novel Since this control over the performative shift marks the Party s special powers it represents for Orwell everything that was particularly fearsome about totalitarianism in the mid twentieth century This contrasts conspicuously with the function of performative language in David Foster Wallace that I observed in Chapter 1 political renewal is signaled primarily through visible adjustments to the orthography representing characters dialogue and freeindirect discourse Within the novel characters transform the constative dead clich s that signal little more than cultural competency in English into the performative linguistic signs that display allegiance to a new Discourse Community and recovery Recoverers enact this performative shift through their will and commitment to the restorative system For Wallace the performative shift is not only achieved willingly but is eminently desirable a symbol of recovery from the personal disease that captures American postindustrial malaise in microcosm These divergent perspectives each dramatize the performative shift to explore the relationship between language and politics as it stands in their unique contexts reflecting together an uneasy sliding dialectic that above all accentuates the inherent volatility in language that is exacerbated by the exertion of political power on its use and conventions Both Orwell s anti totalitarianism and Wallace s concerns about intersubjectivity and addiction engender meditations on this political linguistic relationship each hinging on the specific role of the performative shift in their context Orwell fearing government manipulation and civic passivity focuses on the destruction of the natural linguistic order owing to the introduction of state power in the linguistic realm and Wallace attempts to recover from that destruction decades later and use that limitless linguistic capacity to struggle for political regeneration at century s end Recall that in Infinite Jest community reconstruction an act symbolically significant within the Wallacean oeuvre as a step toward 13
Chapter 3 from The Power of the Performative Shift Critical Thesis by Mitchell Edwards In the first chapter of this thesis I discussed the role of constative and performative language in Infinite Jest viewed through a lens of community building and social reconstruction This sociolinguistic concept is of much use in analyzing 1984 as well and appropriate for understanding the protean unsure relationship between language and power in both texts In an informative but generous reading of Orwellian linguistics Paul Chilton theorizes that 1984 s Newspeak exemplifies most closely neither a dialect or distinctive language of its own but a sublanguage as defined by linguists Kitteridge and Lehrberger Chilton 135 Sublanguages are artificial creations contrasted with natural languages Sublanguages have a controlled and theoretically limited vocabulary created only to describe a specific and limited slice of the world and experience Chilton 136 In making this comparison Chilton compares Newspeak to one of English s most recognizable sublanguages legal language Newspeak resembles the legal sublanguage s emphasis on language as performance legal speech acts being perhaps the most important terms in that sublanguage Chilton s chosen example is the exclamation Guilty in a court of law 137 According to Chilton Newspeak reflects a similar centrality of the speech act and its implicit power his example here is the declaration that 2 2 5 because the Party says so 137 Chilton s example of this performative speech act in 1984 is only one of many all of which show a mechanic important to language in Orwell s novel the exertion of power through linguistic means Chilton observes that the relationship between constative and performative language is often ambiguous and highly contextual 137 Statements that may be purely constative in some contexts e g 2 2 5 is normally just a positive if verifiably false statement can be considered performative in others stating that equation in 1984 s Oceania signals submission to the Party and to orthodoxy Beyond brute force beyond camps and bombs and clubs and guns the Party s true strength is illustrated by its manipulation of constative and performative language Orwell 12 energizes the Party with the power to transmute the constative to the performative to give stipulative force to statements Chilton 137 Orwell portrays overwhelming power as the catalyst in this linguistic alchemy as Winston Smith s performative language is prompted by the exertion of state power and is a linguistic admission of deferment to that power Performative language does not limit itself to just speech acts as one can see in the last line of Orwell s novel Free indirect discourse allows Orwell to manifest this linguistic control in the narration itself as Winston s thoughts direct the novel s final statement He loved Big Brother Nineteen 298 Here the Party s power extends not only to Winston s thoughts his language or the language of the state Orwell uses this literary device to admit linguistic manipulation into the narrative sphere to infect the text itself and allow the fictional state a foothold in an artifact of the real I choose to call this crucial moment of transformation to performative language the performative shift and recognition of its presence and importance as an exploration of language power dynamics in both Orwell and Wallace further illuminates our comparative understanding of the two Orwell portrays the performative shift as an action forced by an extreme concentration of power power vested in the totalitarian state To Orwell the forced performative shift is the ultimate symbol of totalitarian oppression The concept weaves together nearly all the author s well documented fears and enemies linguistic manipulation enforced political orthodoxy arbitrary state sanctioned violence upon man and soul both The aspects of totalitarianism thought to be its defining traits the union of external coercion and internal psychological domination allow this hegemony over performative language in Orwell s novel Since this control over the performative shift marks the Party s special powers it represents for Orwell everything that was particularly fearsome about totalitarianism in the mid twentieth century This contrasts conspicuously with the function of performative language in David Foster Wallace that I observed in Chapter 1 political renewal is signaled primarily through visible adjustments to the orthography representing characters dialogue and freeindirect discourse Within the novel characters transform the constative dead clich s that signal little more than cultural competency in English into the performative linguistic signs that display allegiance to a new Discourse Community and recovery Recoverers enact this performative shift through their will and commitment to the restorative system For Wallace the performative shift is not only achieved willingly but is eminently desirable a symbol of recovery from the personal disease that captures American postindustrial malaise in microcosm These divergent perspectives each dramatize the performative shift to explore the relationship between language and politics as it stands in their unique contexts reflecting together an uneasy sliding dialectic that above all accentuates the inherent volatility in language that is exacerbated by the exertion of political power on its use and conventions Both Orwell s anti totalitarianism and Wallace s concerns about intersubjectivity and addiction engender meditations on this political linguistic relationship each hinging on the specific role of the performative shift in their context Orwell fearing government manipulation and civic passivity focuses on the destruction of the natural linguistic order owing to the introduction of state power in the linguistic realm and Wallace attempts to recover from that destruction decades later and use that limitless linguistic capacity to struggle for political regeneration at century s end Recall that in Infinite Jest community reconstruction an act symbolically significant within the Wallacean oeuvre as a step toward 13
From Inscription and Exchange in Herman Melville s Moby Dick or The Whale Critical Thesis by Lucas M F Giveen Queequeg s Banknote Even before the Pequod sets sail we are asked to think of tattoos as semiotic marks that establish personal discreteness and identity in an economic context Although he is impressed with Queequeg s skill with a harpoon Captain Peleg presumes that Queequeg is illiterate While this may be true if literacy is limited to English Queequeg demonstrates an easy facility with the implements of writing as he signs his harpooneer s contract Queequeg who had twice or thrice before taken part in similar ceremonies looked no ways abashed but taking the offered pen copied upon the paper in the proper place an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm so that through Captain Peleg s obstinate mistake touching his appellative it stood something like this Quohog his mark 89 ch 18 Queequeg s ability to use Western writing implements suggests that Polynesian tattooing and design should be considered as forms of writing However Chapter 18 His Mark makes clear that for Melville literacy is a double edged sword The scene decisively links writing tattooing and the commoditized world of Moby Dick The contract is a paper money banknote issued by the Bank of Queequeg Queequeg guarantees the note which legally promises the bearer three years of his labor aboard the Pequod The replication of a symbol for this purpose transforms Queequg s tattoos from a unified aesthetic system into semiotic components designating property and economic value When Queequeg signs his contract with a mark from his body his tattoo becomes a marker of his identity a name that binds him to 14 his contract Due to the nature of the complete subjugation to the captain in seafaring relations Queequeg becomes a synecdochic hand of the captain and of the Nantucket oil harvesting apparatus In using the tattooed mark to identify himself for this purpose Queequeg submits to the transformation of his tattoo into a livestock brand marking his identity and the economic system s ownership of his body Matthew Cordova Frankel notes that the cross printed in nearly all editions of Moby Dick to represent Queequeg s mark bears nothing in common with Melville s description of the queer round figure In suggesting that future editions use a character such as in order to approximate Melville s description more closely Frankel 137 Frankel misses the seamier connotations of the theme of roundness which in Moby Dick evokes the possible absence of spiritual meaning in a commoditized framework If Queequeg s cipherlike tattoo conscripts him into the framework of economic exchange he himself has been made into a coin metaphorically exchangeable for an empty world Queequeg s measure of literacy is the necessary condition for this process just as the ability to sign one s name or make one s mark is an important foundation of personal identity necessary to the collective enforcement of individual responsibility to the economic apparatus Frankel does not note that the Greek letter theta he suggests attempts to translate what he calls Queequeg s untranslatable mark 137 into a Western alphabet tacitly accepting the same typographical conventions to which Melville would have been confined Assuming Melville was aware of the specific constraints that would govern the printing of Moby Dick his attempt to directly represent the mark is an unusual decision for he would have seen the problem with representing Queequeg s tattoo in a Western alphabet and yet went out of his way to use a typographical character The discussion between Ishmael and Captains Bildad and Peleg earlier in Chapter 18 illustrates why The captains concern that Queequeg is a cannibal 87 ch 18 allows Ishmael to point out the inconsistencies in their ideas of piety Bildad wants assurance that Queequeg attends a specific church to which Ishmael responds that Christianity includes the whole worshipping world 88 After hearing Ishmael s universalist argument the captains are eager to conscript Queequeg into their money economy The cross substituted for Queequeg s mark reinforces the satire of the scene heavily censored in the British edition which identifies the Christian tendency to deny that there is any similarity between money and a universal grand belief 88 a position whose contradictions Ishmael is dedicated to slyly exposing We learn two chapters earlier that Bildad believes that a man s religion is one thing and this practical world quite another This world pays dividends 74 ch 16 Melville turns the problematic issue of representing Queequeg s mark into a self conscious exaggeration of unacknowledged contradictions between Christian anti money rhetoric and actual economic practice Melville s handwritten drafts of Moby Dick do not survive so we will never know for certain what he had in mind when he described Queequeg s mark as a queer round figure A likely model that has not before been proposed is the Marquesan ipu calabash motif often tattooed on the arm Figure 11 The motif is associated with corporeal closure owing to its resemblance to a shell a hard outer covering for the body Gell 191 Melville would have seen the motif while in the Marquesas and possibly in engravings 15
From Inscription and Exchange in Herman Melville s Moby Dick or The Whale Critical Thesis by Lucas M F Giveen Queequeg s Banknote Even before the Pequod sets sail we are asked to think of tattoos as semiotic marks that establish personal discreteness and identity in an economic context Although he is impressed with Queequeg s skill with a harpoon Captain Peleg presumes that Queequeg is illiterate While this may be true if literacy is limited to English Queequeg demonstrates an easy facility with the implements of writing as he signs his harpooneer s contract Queequeg who had twice or thrice before taken part in similar ceremonies looked no ways abashed but taking the offered pen copied upon the paper in the proper place an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm so that through Captain Peleg s obstinate mistake touching his appellative it stood something like this Quohog his mark 89 ch 18 Queequeg s ability to use Western writing implements suggests that Polynesian tattooing and design should be considered as forms of writing However Chapter 18 His Mark makes clear that for Melville literacy is a double edged sword The scene decisively links writing tattooing and the commoditized world of Moby Dick The contract is a paper money banknote issued by the Bank of Queequeg Queequeg guarantees the note which legally promises the bearer three years of his labor aboard the Pequod The replication of a symbol for this purpose transforms Queequg s tattoos from a unified aesthetic system into semiotic components designating property and economic value When Queequeg signs his contract with a mark from his body his tattoo becomes a marker of his identity a name that binds him to 14 his contract Due to the nature of the complete subjugation to the captain in seafaring relations Queequeg becomes a synecdochic hand of the captain and of the Nantucket oil harvesting apparatus In using the tattooed mark to identify himself for this purpose Queequeg submits to the transformation of his tattoo into a livestock brand marking his identity and the economic system s ownership of his body Matthew Cordova Frankel notes that the cross printed in nearly all editions of Moby Dick to represent Queequeg s mark bears nothing in common with Melville s description of the queer round figure In suggesting that future editions use a character such as in order to approximate Melville s description more closely Frankel 137 Frankel misses the seamier connotations of the theme of roundness which in Moby Dick evokes the possible absence of spiritual meaning in a commoditized framework If Queequeg s cipherlike tattoo conscripts him into the framework of economic exchange he himself has been made into a coin metaphorically exchangeable for an empty world Queequeg s measure of literacy is the necessary condition for this process just as the ability to sign one s name or make one s mark is an important foundation of personal identity necessary to the collective enforcement of individual responsibility to the economic apparatus Frankel does not note that the Greek letter theta he suggests attempts to translate what he calls Queequeg s untranslatable mark 137 into a Western alphabet tacitly accepting the same typographical conventions to which Melville would have been confined Assuming Melville was aware of the specific constraints that would govern the printing of Moby Dick his attempt to directly represent the mark is an unusual decision for he would have seen the problem with representing Queequeg s tattoo in a Western alphabet and yet went out of his way to use a typographical character The discussion between Ishmael and Captains Bildad and Peleg earlier in Chapter 18 illustrates why The captains concern that Queequeg is a cannibal 87 ch 18 allows Ishmael to point out the inconsistencies in their ideas of piety Bildad wants assurance that Queequeg attends a specific church to which Ishmael responds that Christianity includes the whole worshipping world 88 After hearing Ishmael s universalist argument the captains are eager to conscript Queequeg into their money economy The cross substituted for Queequeg s mark reinforces the satire of the scene heavily censored in the British edition which identifies the Christian tendency to deny that there is any similarity between money and a universal grand belief 88 a position whose contradictions Ishmael is dedicated to slyly exposing We learn two chapters earlier that Bildad believes that a man s religion is one thing and this practical world quite another This world pays dividends 74 ch 16 Melville turns the problematic issue of representing Queequeg s mark into a self conscious exaggeration of unacknowledged contradictions between Christian anti money rhetoric and actual economic practice Melville s handwritten drafts of Moby Dick do not survive so we will never know for certain what he had in mind when he described Queequeg s mark as a queer round figure A likely model that has not before been proposed is the Marquesan ipu calabash motif often tattooed on the arm Figure 11 The motif is associated with corporeal closure owing to its resemblance to a shell a hard outer covering for the body Gell 191 Melville would have seen the motif while in the Marquesas and possibly in engravings 15
available to him in America Whether or not he knew of its specific connotations Melville s evocation of the motif puns on the concept of bodily discreteness that is demonstrated by the use of a name or a mark to sign a contract Queequeg s name has been thought of as a nonsense word made up by Melville to sound vaguely Polynesian but Peleg s apparent mispronunciation suggests another source Considering Queequeg s contract as paper money we will remember that wampum Native American Indian money which was the conceptual source for the invention of paper money in the United States was made of quahog shells 1 The various attempts to Romanize the Algonquian words from which quahog derives suggest a closer phonological resonance than most modern readers realize 2 The similarity between the quahog shell and the ipu motif suggests that Melville knew more about Marquesan tattooing than most scholars believe and the triple pun further accentuates Queequeg s tattoos as a numismatic inscription Like wampum Queequeg is consumed and used for profit by an insatiable American economic apparatus and his literacy facilitates the process 1 See Shell Wampum for the argument that the invention of paper money in America was a direct appropriation of the Native American economic structure Early American banknotes often portrayed Indians visually demonstrating the reappropriation of wampum in the form of paper money 57 73 2 Webster s dictionary gives Poquauhock as the etymological root for quahog a spelling deriving from Roger Williams 1643 glossary of Narragansett Williams 144 Other sources suggest alternate formations of the word in other Algonquian languages such as pouhquahhaug and piquaughhaug in Mohegan Pequot whence the name Pequod Prince 37 As speaking the Pequot language was a capital offense after the end of the Pequot War in 1638 the language is nearly extinct The only extant glossary of the Mohegan Pequot language was compiled largely by consulting only one native speaker who the Glossary s compilers acknowledge has kept up her scanty knowledge of her early speech chiefly by talking to herself Prince 18 Disagreements about the consonants in the middle of the word suggest sounds to which Western ears are not accustomed It is perfectly plausible that such a sound might have been transliterated as qu as Melville does in his version Queequeg naming his character after the Native American money clam Mercenaria mercenaria 16 From The Expat Fiction Thesis by Hansen Shi Nostalgia as a psychopathological condition was first defined in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer who as a young medical student at the University of Basel observed its prevalence amongst Swiss mercenaries serving in the lowlands of France and Italy For these hired guns the psychological condition manifested in a wide range of physical symptoms including but not limited to fever fainting anxiety insomnia stomach pain heart arrhythmia and death The disease was taken so seriously that whistling one particular milking song called KhueReyen became a crime punishable by death So for a while the disease came to be known as Mal du Suisse These days I often find myself thinking about Hofer s mercenaries stalking through the lowlands with a permanent whistle in their ears I like to imagine them as an army of Werthers yellow panted and blue jacketed each clutching an identical damp notebook in their breast pockets When I first learned about Hofer s study in my freshman year of college I used to think that a band of hired guns was a pretty strange sample to select for the scientific study of homesickness Now more than a decade later I think I finally understand Only a mercenary could contract such a fatal heartache because he is even further from home than a regular soldier This is because he has cut himself off from the heart Since I moved read fled to Sydney three months ago I have experienced many symptoms of chronic nostalgia I am unable to sleep at night and lie awake in bed listening to endless hours of NPR podcasts I have lost weight which I am secretly thrilled about I have become obsessed with consumed by the news in America Nostalgia also torments me during my waking hours Sydney is perpetually flooded with sunshine a cultural export of California If I close my eyes while walking through the farmers market in Pyrmont Bay Park the scent of strawberries and salt water teleports me to the San Francisco Ferry Building Marketplace And then there is the ceaseless torrent of American movies television music fast food chains coffee shops and personal electronics Here is what I have learned as an ex American nostalgia is as inescapable as the earth s gravitational field not a perfect analogy I am aware since an American flag flies on the moon I sink daily into a depthless vortex It s a million little things songs on the radio that tug at buried memories the familiar yet foreign shape of grocery bags at the supermarket fleeting faces in the street that sometimes stop my heart like a rattlesnake There are definitely a lot of Chinese in Sydney Most of them I am told come from Hong Kong which makes their dialect unintelligible to me Of course there is only one Chinese I really want to see and luckily she does not speak Cantonese Unfortunately at the time of this writing I have no idea where she is or whether it might be possible for me to see her ever again Because there are so many real Chinese in Sydney many people here assume I am one of them which in my former life would have made me bristle with indignation but which in my current one affords me a veil of anonymity I have come to appreciate In this life I have learned not only to be surreptitious but even to take pleasure in it My fear is that one of these days I will somehow be recognized and forced to move again because sooner or later I will run out of former British colonies and Canada is already out of the question One thing that is definitively unfamiliar about Sydney is the heat Accustomed as I am to the Mediterranean climate of the Bay Area the city feels sweltering positively tropical That s why I spend as much time in my apartment as possible For those of you who are familiar with Sydney s cartography I live in a new development called Opera Residences in Bennelong Point The building smells like Chinese money which smells like commercial real estate My place is very comfortable and came fully furnished when I moved in My handler had arranged it so which I was simultaneously grateful for and irritated by Appreciated because it relieved me of the dreaded task of moving in by myself irritated because the place is now almost too comfortable It s not uncommon for me to spend the whole day here in the living room looking out into the Harbor making coffee and aimlessly jotting things down on paper like I m doing today The irony is not lost on me that the entire country used to be a penal colony I don t have to tell you that I ve been lonely because you can probably infer that from the fact that I am writing this in the first place So without further ado I suppose I should say The point of this document is to set the record straight 17
available to him in America Whether or not he knew of its specific connotations Melville s evocation of the motif puns on the concept of bodily discreteness that is demonstrated by the use of a name or a mark to sign a contract Queequeg s name has been thought of as a nonsense word made up by Melville to sound vaguely Polynesian but Peleg s apparent mispronunciation suggests another source Considering Queequeg s contract as paper money we will remember that wampum Native American Indian money which was the conceptual source for the invention of paper money in the United States was made of quahog shells 1 The various attempts to Romanize the Algonquian words from which quahog derives suggest a closer phonological resonance than most modern readers realize 2 The similarity between the quahog shell and the ipu motif suggests that Melville knew more about Marquesan tattooing than most scholars believe and the triple pun further accentuates Queequeg s tattoos as a numismatic inscription Like wampum Queequeg is consumed and used for profit by an insatiable American economic apparatus and his literacy facilitates the process 1 See Shell Wampum for the argument that the invention of paper money in America was a direct appropriation of the Native American economic structure Early American banknotes often portrayed Indians visually demonstrating the reappropriation of wampum in the form of paper money 57 73 2 Webster s dictionary gives Poquauhock as the etymological root for quahog a spelling deriving from Roger Williams 1643 glossary of Narragansett Williams 144 Other sources suggest alternate formations of the word in other Algonquian languages such as pouhquahhaug and piquaughhaug in Mohegan Pequot whence the name Pequod Prince 37 As speaking the Pequot language was a capital offense after the end of the Pequot War in 1638 the language is nearly extinct The only extant glossary of the Mohegan Pequot language was compiled largely by consulting only one native speaker who the Glossary s compilers acknowledge has kept up her scanty knowledge of her early speech chiefly by talking to herself Prince 18 Disagreements about the consonants in the middle of the word suggest sounds to which Western ears are not accustomed It is perfectly plausible that such a sound might have been transliterated as qu as Melville does in his version Queequeg naming his character after the Native American money clam Mercenaria mercenaria 16 From The Expat Fiction Thesis by Hansen Shi Nostalgia as a psychopathological condition was first defined in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer who as a young medical student at the University of Basel observed its prevalence amongst Swiss mercenaries serving in the lowlands of France and Italy For these hired guns the psychological condition manifested in a wide range of physical symptoms including but not limited to fever fainting anxiety insomnia stomach pain heart arrhythmia and death The disease was taken so seriously that whistling one particular milking song called KhueReyen became a crime punishable by death So for a while the disease came to be known as Mal du Suisse These days I often find myself thinking about Hofer s mercenaries stalking through the lowlands with a permanent whistle in their ears I like to imagine them as an army of Werthers yellow panted and blue jacketed each clutching an identical damp notebook in their breast pockets When I first learned about Hofer s study in my freshman year of college I used to think that a band of hired guns was a pretty strange sample to select for the scientific study of homesickness Now more than a decade later I think I finally understand Only a mercenary could contract such a fatal heartache because he is even further from home than a regular soldier This is because he has cut himself off from the heart Since I moved read fled to Sydney three months ago I have experienced many symptoms of chronic nostalgia I am unable to sleep at night and lie awake in bed listening to endless hours of NPR podcasts I have lost weight which I am secretly thrilled about I have become obsessed with consumed by the news in America Nostalgia also torments me during my waking hours Sydney is perpetually flooded with sunshine a cultural export of California If I close my eyes while walking through the farmers market in Pyrmont Bay Park the scent of strawberries and salt water teleports me to the San Francisco Ferry Building Marketplace And then there is the ceaseless torrent of American movies television music fast food chains coffee shops and personal electronics Here is what I have learned as an ex American nostalgia is as inescapable as the earth s gravitational field not a perfect analogy I am aware since an American flag flies on the moon I sink daily into a depthless vortex It s a million little things songs on the radio that tug at buried memories the familiar yet foreign shape of grocery bags at the supermarket fleeting faces in the street that sometimes stop my heart like a rattlesnake There are definitely a lot of Chinese in Sydney Most of them I am told come from Hong Kong which makes their dialect unintelligible to me Of course there is only one Chinese I really want to see and luckily she does not speak Cantonese Unfortunately at the time of this writing I have no idea where she is or whether it might be possible for me to see her ever again Because there are so many real Chinese in Sydney many people here assume I am one of them which in my former life would have made me bristle with indignation but which in my current one affords me a veil of anonymity I have come to appreciate In this life I have learned not only to be surreptitious but even to take pleasure in it My fear is that one of these days I will somehow be recognized and forced to move again because sooner or later I will run out of former British colonies and Canada is already out of the question One thing that is definitively unfamiliar about Sydney is the heat Accustomed as I am to the Mediterranean climate of the Bay Area the city feels sweltering positively tropical That s why I spend as much time in my apartment as possible For those of you who are familiar with Sydney s cartography I live in a new development called Opera Residences in Bennelong Point The building smells like Chinese money which smells like commercial real estate My place is very comfortable and came fully furnished when I moved in My handler had arranged it so which I was simultaneously grateful for and irritated by Appreciated because it relieved me of the dreaded task of moving in by myself irritated because the place is now almost too comfortable It s not uncommon for me to spend the whole day here in the living room looking out into the Harbor making coffee and aimlessly jotting things down on paper like I m doing today The irony is not lost on me that the entire country used to be a penal colony I don t have to tell you that I ve been lonely because you can probably infer that from the fact that I am writing this in the first place So without further ado I suppose I should say The point of this document is to set the record straight 17
During the last few months I had in America many people said a lot of very bad things about me some of which were true but many of which were false And I resent that More importantly I feel compelled to tell this story with complete honesty from beginning to end even if no one reads it just for the sake of alleviating my nostalgia Knowing that I can never return home I want to at least preserve an accurate map of that place in case one day the grocery bags in the supermarket start feeling too familiar in my aging hands It goes without saying that I am also writing this for her with the hope that one day she can understand what she did to me To begin here is something that you must know about California The allure of California is simple For centuries now gold has drawn the Chinese to California like mayflies to a lamplight Like iron shavings to a magnet We flooded into the ports of Jiu Jin Shan Old Gold Mountain what the Chinese called Herb Caen s Baghdad by the Bay first on barges then on planes After gold there was steel After steel there was silicon That brings us to the present Remember we ve always been looking for gold in San Francisco Excerpt from House of Reformation Fiction Thesis by Laura Hatt A single blue strobe light flashes erratically Marian squeezes through the study bobbing along to Def Leppard s Rock of Ages and making brief conversation with the partygoers who clap her back as she passes She loves the sensation of entering a party at the Pi Eta Speaker s Society closed parties especially Each flushed face triggers a host of memories chilly spring picnics by the Charles River graceful black tie dinners at the Sheraton Commander bright salty barbecues in Isaac s dad s backyard Even the clubhouse s smoky tang most pungent at first entry is evocative But Marian is already late after a moment of indulgence she presses forward The salon the next room in the clubhouse s sinuous layout is both larger and louder Near the east 18 wall Stan teeters on the back of an ornate armchair naked but for thin briefs and an unbuttoned Oxford shirt He eyes the moose head mounted above the fireplace lunges for an antler and misses crashing hard onto his guffawing friends Rock of Ages gives way to Comin Under Fire Marian creeps gingerly forward Stan is so gentle when he s sober that she s shocked anew every time she spots him in screamingparty animal mode Stan Have you seen Keith she howls Stan clutches his belly Marian rolls her eyes Go upstairs and lie down she says patting his shoulder Drink some water After a lap of the salon Marian strides toward the Sanctum the largest room in the clubhouse It s rarely used for closed parties Indeed the broad parquet dance floor is empty but for a lone couple gently swaying and against the far wall five men slouched across a long velvet couch Marian lingers in the doorway a moment watching them She sees Keith everywhere Most of her sightings are accurate they take the same classes and run in the same circles but she has a lot of false positives too Lately all it takes is a firm cheek or a rounded nose in a crowd for every nerve in her body to snap taut It s not about beauty although she thinks he is beautiful or sex which they re technically not having She decided once that her fascination probably stems from his fundamental opacity Although she believes she knows him as completely as any person can know another and although the profundity of their bond sometimes draws her to those verses of Colossians that permit love to literally transcend individuality he remains an essentially distinct and autonomous adult His behavior is sensible but somehow enigmatic his love is apparent but in the end unknowable That reality although not unique to Keith who is actually quite forthright as men go both stings and intrigues Thus Marian finds herself in a state of constant pursuit Keith arms stretched across the men on his sides looks up He smiles Marian he calls across the dance floor Marian breaks into motion the parquet sticky beneath her plastic heels When she arrives at the couch she bends down for a kiss Keith cups her cheek and delivers The other boys make playful puking sounds Marian shivers a little Keith tastes like weed She learned about Keith s drug use on their third date when he pulled out a joint at the intermission of King Lear The Musical She almost ended it right there Even then years before she first met the Senator at that Pi Eta cocktail party she d been following Nancy Reagan and her crusade with interest Put it out Marian said Keith looked up at her wide eyed and stubbed out his joint Then he took her hand and guided her back to the theater where she sat fixed with indecision through the last two acts She never thought she could be attracted to a criminal and yet there she was laser focused on the lean body humming with toxins beside her She never did manage to resolve her attraction to Keith with her distaste for drugs In general she s fallen back on cognitive dissonance Sometimes though when she writes memos about crack or introduces the Senator s 10 year plan to eradicate drugs in the United States she sees Keith smoking that first joint The lips in this vision are always disembodied though recognizably Keith s Excerpt from Transubstantial Fictions Reimagining Sacred Histories in Wolf Hall and the Testament of Mary Critical Joint Thesis by Robert Hopkirk However even as The Testament of Mary begins to facilitate Mary s eruption from silence into speech it cautions the reader to treat its own literary intervention with suspicion Mary s distinction between unmediated witness and mediated history is hopelessly confused in her own Testament this Mary who decries the shaping of her life is herself shaped by a literary fiction She remains a character in someone else s story susceptible to being misread assimilated into an alien narrative and reduced to a cipher Paradoxically although she speaks before the reader this Mary persistently insists that she not be made an object for display or devotion She recoils when onlookers identify her as somehow intimately connected to her son s miraculous ministry I did not know how these people knew who I was That they should stand back for me struck me as almost funny something I might dream but it was not funny it was frightening when I saw the mixture of respect and fear in their eyes 1 For Mary it is not merely the fact that she is being misread but the fact that she is legible to strangers at all that disturbs her and threatens 1 T ib n Colm The Testament of Mary New York Scribner 2012 33 19
During the last few months I had in America many people said a lot of very bad things about me some of which were true but many of which were false And I resent that More importantly I feel compelled to tell this story with complete honesty from beginning to end even if no one reads it just for the sake of alleviating my nostalgia Knowing that I can never return home I want to at least preserve an accurate map of that place in case one day the grocery bags in the supermarket start feeling too familiar in my aging hands It goes without saying that I am also writing this for her with the hope that one day she can understand what she did to me To begin here is something that you must know about California The allure of California is simple For centuries now gold has drawn the Chinese to California like mayflies to a lamplight Like iron shavings to a magnet We flooded into the ports of Jiu Jin Shan Old Gold Mountain what the Chinese called Herb Caen s Baghdad by the Bay first on barges then on planes After gold there was steel After steel there was silicon That brings us to the present Remember we ve always been looking for gold in San Francisco Excerpt from House of Reformation Fiction Thesis by Laura Hatt A single blue strobe light flashes erratically Marian squeezes through the study bobbing along to Def Leppard s Rock of Ages and making brief conversation with the partygoers who clap her back as she passes She loves the sensation of entering a party at the Pi Eta Speaker s Society closed parties especially Each flushed face triggers a host of memories chilly spring picnics by the Charles River graceful black tie dinners at the Sheraton Commander bright salty barbecues in Isaac s dad s backyard Even the clubhouse s smoky tang most pungent at first entry is evocative But Marian is already late after a moment of indulgence she presses forward The salon the next room in the clubhouse s sinuous layout is both larger and louder Near the east 18 wall Stan teeters on the back of an ornate armchair naked but for thin briefs and an unbuttoned Oxford shirt He eyes the moose head mounted above the fireplace lunges for an antler and misses crashing hard onto his guffawing friends Rock of Ages gives way to Comin Under Fire Marian creeps gingerly forward Stan is so gentle when he s sober that she s shocked anew every time she spots him in screamingparty animal mode Stan Have you seen Keith she howls Stan clutches his belly Marian rolls her eyes Go upstairs and lie down she says patting his shoulder Drink some water After a lap of the salon Marian strides toward the Sanctum the largest room in the clubhouse It s rarely used for closed parties Indeed the broad parquet dance floor is empty but for a lone couple gently swaying and against the far wall five men slouched across a long velvet couch Marian lingers in the doorway a moment watching them She sees Keith everywhere Most of her sightings are accurate they take the same classes and run in the same circles but she has a lot of false positives too Lately all it takes is a firm cheek or a rounded nose in a crowd for every nerve in her body to snap taut It s not about beauty although she thinks he is beautiful or sex which they re technically not having She decided once that her fascination probably stems from his fundamental opacity Although she believes she knows him as completely as any person can know another and although the profundity of their bond sometimes draws her to those verses of Colossians that permit love to literally transcend individuality he remains an essentially distinct and autonomous adult His behavior is sensible but somehow enigmatic his love is apparent but in the end unknowable That reality although not unique to Keith who is actually quite forthright as men go both stings and intrigues Thus Marian finds herself in a state of constant pursuit Keith arms stretched across the men on his sides looks up He smiles Marian he calls across the dance floor Marian breaks into motion the parquet sticky beneath her plastic heels When she arrives at the couch she bends down for a kiss Keith cups her cheek and delivers The other boys make playful puking sounds Marian shivers a little Keith tastes like weed She learned about Keith s drug use on their third date when he pulled out a joint at the intermission of King Lear The Musical She almost ended it right there Even then years before she first met the Senator at that Pi Eta cocktail party she d been following Nancy Reagan and her crusade with interest Put it out Marian said Keith looked up at her wide eyed and stubbed out his joint Then he took her hand and guided her back to the theater where she sat fixed with indecision through the last two acts She never thought she could be attracted to a criminal and yet there she was laser focused on the lean body humming with toxins beside her She never did manage to resolve her attraction to Keith with her distaste for drugs In general she s fallen back on cognitive dissonance Sometimes though when she writes memos about crack or introduces the Senator s 10 year plan to eradicate drugs in the United States she sees Keith smoking that first joint The lips in this vision are always disembodied though recognizably Keith s Excerpt from Transubstantial Fictions Reimagining Sacred Histories in Wolf Hall and the Testament of Mary Critical Joint Thesis by Robert Hopkirk However even as The Testament of Mary begins to facilitate Mary s eruption from silence into speech it cautions the reader to treat its own literary intervention with suspicion Mary s distinction between unmediated witness and mediated history is hopelessly confused in her own Testament this Mary who decries the shaping of her life is herself shaped by a literary fiction She remains a character in someone else s story susceptible to being misread assimilated into an alien narrative and reduced to a cipher Paradoxically although she speaks before the reader this Mary persistently insists that she not be made an object for display or devotion She recoils when onlookers identify her as somehow intimately connected to her son s miraculous ministry I did not know how these people knew who I was That they should stand back for me struck me as almost funny something I might dream but it was not funny it was frightening when I saw the mixture of respect and fear in their eyes 1 For Mary it is not merely the fact that she is being misread but the fact that she is legible to strangers at all that disturbs her and threatens 1 T ib n Colm The Testament of Mary New York Scribner 2012 33 19
her sense of reality As this passage indicates Mary craves anonymity and can only lament when her new public identity as a miracle worker s mother subsumes her private identity Even her old friends Martha and Mary regard her as a conduit to the divine 2 She is in danger of no longer recognizing herself The novella slyly suggests the possibility that historical fiction risks perpetuating this cycle of misreading by mirroring the reader s relationship to Mary in Mary s own relationship with Artemis For the reader who has placed Mary on a rarified pedestal it is unsettling to hear her express these same sentiments of awe to the silent statue of a Greek goddess Seeing the statue of Artemis for the first time in that second as I stared at it the statue was radiating abidance and bounty fertility and grace The poison was not in my heart I gazed at the statue of the old goddess she who has seen more than I have and suffered more because she has lived more 3 On the surface this scene plays out like merely a slick parody of Marian devotion with Mary herself venerating a pagan goddess in terms not far removed from the Ave Maria What is more startling than the Mother of God s disregard for monotheism however is her insistence on the finitude of her own experiences and particularly of her own suffering This is the same woman who here as in the Gospel of John stands watch as her son dies in agony At times pitying adoration for Mary s ordeal has exceeded the available language of the institutional church with Bernard of Clairvaux insisting to Mary Yes a violent grief pierced your soul so that we may say with good reason that you are more than a martyr in that your feeling of compassion exceeded physical suffering 4 The Mary in this novella however preemptively declares any such praise to be a deliberate misreading simply because her powers of compassion simply do not stretch that far I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel 5 Mary implicitly resists overstepping the bounds of the art and becoming something more substantial than fiction the intercessor of the Catholic tradition 6 Furthermore Mary insists that not only does she fall short of sainthood she also fails in her role as mother Even those who doubt Jesus s divinity could likely wonder at the extraordinary pathos of a mother beholding her son s crucifixion Despite this Mary still feels an inadequacy in her self a regret that her love could not strengthen her to withstand the temptation to abandon her son but was instead subject to common human frailty Perhaps I was right to save myself when I could But it does not feel like that now and it never has But I will say it now because it has to be said by someone once I did it to save myself I did it for no other reason 7 The reader looks to her for speech only to find her as a humble human votary seeking comfort from some other goddess Mary s frustration with the greatness thrust upon her only adds poignancy to her prayers to Artemis There is now no escape How can she who cannot reassure herself offer reassurance to others The strategy of verbal resistance will only go so far Mary desires a permanent release from this narrative What she cannot say aloud to the evangelists of the eternal life she murmurs to a statue I speak to her in whispers the great goddess Artemis bountiful with her arms outstretched and her many breasts waiting to nurture those who come towards her I tell her how much I long now to sleep in the dry earth to go to dust peacefully 8 Ironically this stolen moment shows that the mother of the risen Christ fears resurrection as a prolongation of her suffering When the Mary of this novella learns that her son has raised Lazarus from the dead she shudders in revulsion It would represent a mockery of the sky itself No one should tamper with the fullness that is 5 T ib n The Testament of Mary 2 2 Ibid 30 As they both came towards me I realized that I was associated in their minds with what had occurred and that they wished to touch me embrace me thank me as if I had something to do with the fact that their brother was alive 3 Ibid 9 4 Bernard of Clairvaux On the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary In Sermons for the Autumn Season Cistercian Fathers Collegeville MN Liturgical Press 2016 68 Emphasis mine 20 6 See Sarah Elliott Novacich Alchemical Fictions Postmedieval A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 7 no 2 2016 222 Mary is believed to be real a presence made of words plaster or paper m ch and that belief combined together one to whom or for whom you might listen 7 T ib n The Testament of Mary 65 Mary s inability to suffer alongside her son casts a sharp contrast with Catholic devotion towards her compassion at the crucifixion See Amy Neff The Pain of Compassio Mary s Labor at the Foot of the Cross The Art Bulletin 80 no 2 1998 254 73 death Death needs time and silence The dead must be left alone with their new gift or their new freedom from affliction 9 These words however are not her own the text that has resurrected her ascribes them to Mary The novel finally threatens to collapse in on itself a historical fiction that distrusts the propriety of historical fiction an act of resurrection that questions the ethics of all such acts Although T ib n s text positions itself as a contemporary corrective to the gospels what makes his attempt at resurrecting Mary s story any different than those that came before How can Mary escape this cycle of misreading and not end up as another Artemis 9 Ibid 23 Excerpt from What is a Map Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III Critical Thesis by Camille Jacobson Introduction What is a Map Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III When I first saw the oak outside the Brattle Apartments where Elizabeth Bishop once lived it was summer and the air was thick and smelled sour and I thought of that line in Crusoe in England where she writes I d shut my eyes and think about a tree an oak say with real shade somewhere and I thought of all her poems I had read and all the letters I had ever held in my hands and all the lines she had written about New England and Nova Scotia and Brazil lines that I repeat to myself as I walk through Cambridge streets and home again Bishop once wrote that she was always sort of a guest in the places she lived McCabe 203 I am talking here about a time when I was sitting in Houghton Library touching old letters between Bishop and Frank Bidart reading her sad faded words describing her new apartment near Radcliffe Yard Those years Bishop lived in Cambridge were her least happy ones and during that period she must have thought many times of the tall Kapok trees in S o Paulo and shut her eyes and replayed those days in Petr polis with Lota Bishop wrote poetry because she knew no other mode to express 8 Ibid 9 21
her sense of reality As this passage indicates Mary craves anonymity and can only lament when her new public identity as a miracle worker s mother subsumes her private identity Even her old friends Martha and Mary regard her as a conduit to the divine 2 She is in danger of no longer recognizing herself The novella slyly suggests the possibility that historical fiction risks perpetuating this cycle of misreading by mirroring the reader s relationship to Mary in Mary s own relationship with Artemis For the reader who has placed Mary on a rarified pedestal it is unsettling to hear her express these same sentiments of awe to the silent statue of a Greek goddess Seeing the statue of Artemis for the first time in that second as I stared at it the statue was radiating abidance and bounty fertility and grace The poison was not in my heart I gazed at the statue of the old goddess she who has seen more than I have and suffered more because she has lived more 3 On the surface this scene plays out like merely a slick parody of Marian devotion with Mary herself venerating a pagan goddess in terms not far removed from the Ave Maria What is more startling than the Mother of God s disregard for monotheism however is her insistence on the finitude of her own experiences and particularly of her own suffering This is the same woman who here as in the Gospel of John stands watch as her son dies in agony At times pitying adoration for Mary s ordeal has exceeded the available language of the institutional church with Bernard of Clairvaux insisting to Mary Yes a violent grief pierced your soul so that we may say with good reason that you are more than a martyr in that your feeling of compassion exceeded physical suffering 4 The Mary in this novella however preemptively declares any such praise to be a deliberate misreading simply because her powers of compassion simply do not stretch that far I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel 5 Mary implicitly resists overstepping the bounds of the art and becoming something more substantial than fiction the intercessor of the Catholic tradition 6 Furthermore Mary insists that not only does she fall short of sainthood she also fails in her role as mother Even those who doubt Jesus s divinity could likely wonder at the extraordinary pathos of a mother beholding her son s crucifixion Despite this Mary still feels an inadequacy in her self a regret that her love could not strengthen her to withstand the temptation to abandon her son but was instead subject to common human frailty Perhaps I was right to save myself when I could But it does not feel like that now and it never has But I will say it now because it has to be said by someone once I did it to save myself I did it for no other reason 7 The reader looks to her for speech only to find her as a humble human votary seeking comfort from some other goddess Mary s frustration with the greatness thrust upon her only adds poignancy to her prayers to Artemis There is now no escape How can she who cannot reassure herself offer reassurance to others The strategy of verbal resistance will only go so far Mary desires a permanent release from this narrative What she cannot say aloud to the evangelists of the eternal life she murmurs to a statue I speak to her in whispers the great goddess Artemis bountiful with her arms outstretched and her many breasts waiting to nurture those who come towards her I tell her how much I long now to sleep in the dry earth to go to dust peacefully 8 Ironically this stolen moment shows that the mother of the risen Christ fears resurrection as a prolongation of her suffering When the Mary of this novella learns that her son has raised Lazarus from the dead she shudders in revulsion It would represent a mockery of the sky itself No one should tamper with the fullness that is 5 T ib n The Testament of Mary 2 2 Ibid 30 As they both came towards me I realized that I was associated in their minds with what had occurred and that they wished to touch me embrace me thank me as if I had something to do with the fact that their brother was alive 3 Ibid 9 4 Bernard of Clairvaux On the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary In Sermons for the Autumn Season Cistercian Fathers Collegeville MN Liturgical Press 2016 68 Emphasis mine 20 6 See Sarah Elliott Novacich Alchemical Fictions Postmedieval A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 7 no 2 2016 222 Mary is believed to be real a presence made of words plaster or paper m ch and that belief combined together one to whom or for whom you might listen 7 T ib n The Testament of Mary 65 Mary s inability to suffer alongside her son casts a sharp contrast with Catholic devotion towards her compassion at the crucifixion See Amy Neff The Pain of Compassio Mary s Labor at the Foot of the Cross The Art Bulletin 80 no 2 1998 254 73 death Death needs time and silence The dead must be left alone with their new gift or their new freedom from affliction 9 These words however are not her own the text that has resurrected her ascribes them to Mary The novel finally threatens to collapse in on itself a historical fiction that distrusts the propriety of historical fiction an act of resurrection that questions the ethics of all such acts Although T ib n s text positions itself as a contemporary corrective to the gospels what makes his attempt at resurrecting Mary s story any different than those that came before How can Mary escape this cycle of misreading and not end up as another Artemis 9 Ibid 23 Excerpt from What is a Map Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III Critical Thesis by Camille Jacobson Introduction What is a Map Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III When I first saw the oak outside the Brattle Apartments where Elizabeth Bishop once lived it was summer and the air was thick and smelled sour and I thought of that line in Crusoe in England where she writes I d shut my eyes and think about a tree an oak say with real shade somewhere and I thought of all her poems I had read and all the letters I had ever held in my hands and all the lines she had written about New England and Nova Scotia and Brazil lines that I repeat to myself as I walk through Cambridge streets and home again Bishop once wrote that she was always sort of a guest in the places she lived McCabe 203 I am talking here about a time when I was sitting in Houghton Library touching old letters between Bishop and Frank Bidart reading her sad faded words describing her new apartment near Radcliffe Yard Those years Bishop lived in Cambridge were her least happy ones and during that period she must have thought many times of the tall Kapok trees in S o Paulo and shut her eyes and replayed those days in Petr polis with Lota Bishop wrote poetry because she knew no other mode to express 8 Ibid 9 21
the incessant exile of her life pulled perpetually by some elsewhere For her nothing was lasting The purpose then of poetry was control a word a line a stanza written to contain experience and preserve it down onto the page T ib n An individual who felt ceaseless displacement from her early orphaned childhood to a life of travel in her later years it is no wonder that Geography III the product of those final years in Cambridge is so rooted in memory and experience soon to be lost Elizabeth Bishop was born the only child of William T Bishop and Gertrude May Boomer Bishop on February 8 1911 in Worcester Massachusetts Her father died when she was just eight months old and Bishop s mother struggling to bear this grief was sent to a mental institution when Elizabeth was only five years old Millier 2 11 Elizabeth never saw her mother again and spent the rest of her childhood living between her grandparents in Great Village Nova Scotia and her aunt and uncle in New England before arriving at Vassar College where she graduated in 1934 The constant movement of her early years lingered throughout her life she spent decades in Florida New York Mexico and the largest happiest portion of time in Petr polis Brazil with her partner Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares Pursglove Bishop only published one hundred poems in her lifetime and Geography III is the culmination of her career a book entrenched in memories and experiences once lived then crystallized on the page The collection is a constant return to moments of Bishop s childhood in Great Village in Poem to her time in Worcester with her aunt in In the Waiting Room to her journey from Canada to New England in The Moose She gives attention to place to the geography of her life and opens the collection modeled after an elementary school geography primer The page asks the reader what is geography What is a Map In what direction from the center of the picture is the Island For Bishop the collection is an exploration of these questions an explicit revisiting of her past towards the end of her life Geography III urges us to wonder about the ways in which Bishop goes back and forces us to ask for what reasons Excerpt from Revisitations Fiction Thesis by Laurel McCaull Milo 1973 Milo had never seen his parents touch Apart from the occasional elbow assist out of a car or a careful press on the lower back as one squeezed past the other in their compact kitchen Irene and Walt maintained a consistent distance between them For a long time Milo was convinced that he was adopted the idea that his parents were ever in sufficient proximity to conceive was unimaginable They took a similar arm s length approach when it came to raising their children To wake Milo up in the morning his father would give the baseboard of his bed a hearty kick One morning when Milo was eleven and his sister Angie was twelve she came running to the breakfast table in tears Mom I m dying she cried Irene s eyes widened at the blood stained fabric in her daughter s hands You re not dying Go get dressed and we ll discuss this That night she left a package of pads and a pamphlet titled Just Between Us outside Angie s door Three years had passed since then and they still hadn t discussed it Irene and Walt were never abusive but always uncompromising Their home was regimented by a set of rules and routines that felt more reliable and constant than any standard measure of time During the weekdays Irene cooked at home and the family adhered to a strict vegetarian diet They were allowed to eat meat on the weekends but only ever at a restaurant and only if that restaurant had linen napkins and tablecloths Milo suspected the touch of flesh was too much for his mother so she preferred to leave it to the professionals Saturday evenings were reserved for cribbage and backgammon and every Sunday Milo and Angie dutifully piled in the car for Father Randall s morning service where they learned to shore up their vulnerable minds like castles under siege On Sunday afternoons Milo s father would take him to the country club for lunch They never actually golfed but instead would sit in silence watching the green until the waiter came to take their order It was an unspoken agreement between the two 22 23
the incessant exile of her life pulled perpetually by some elsewhere For her nothing was lasting The purpose then of poetry was control a word a line a stanza written to contain experience and preserve it down onto the page T ib n An individual who felt ceaseless displacement from her early orphaned childhood to a life of travel in her later years it is no wonder that Geography III the product of those final years in Cambridge is so rooted in memory and experience soon to be lost Elizabeth Bishop was born the only child of William T Bishop and Gertrude May Boomer Bishop on February 8 1911 in Worcester Massachusetts Her father died when she was just eight months old and Bishop s mother struggling to bear this grief was sent to a mental institution when Elizabeth was only five years old Millier 2 11 Elizabeth never saw her mother again and spent the rest of her childhood living between her grandparents in Great Village Nova Scotia and her aunt and uncle in New England before arriving at Vassar College where she graduated in 1934 The constant movement of her early years lingered throughout her life she spent decades in Florida New York Mexico and the largest happiest portion of time in Petr polis Brazil with her partner Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares Pursglove Bishop only published one hundred poems in her lifetime and Geography III is the culmination of her career a book entrenched in memories and experiences once lived then crystallized on the page The collection is a constant return to moments of Bishop s childhood in Great Village in Poem to her time in Worcester with her aunt in In the Waiting Room to her journey from Canada to New England in The Moose She gives attention to place to the geography of her life and opens the collection modeled after an elementary school geography primer The page asks the reader what is geography What is a Map In what direction from the center of the picture is the Island For Bishop the collection is an exploration of these questions an explicit revisiting of her past towards the end of her life Geography III urges us to wonder about the ways in which Bishop goes back and forces us to ask for what reasons Excerpt from Revisitations Fiction Thesis by Laurel McCaull Milo 1973 Milo had never seen his parents touch Apart from the occasional elbow assist out of a car or a careful press on the lower back as one squeezed past the other in their compact kitchen Irene and Walt maintained a consistent distance between them For a long time Milo was convinced that he was adopted the idea that his parents were ever in sufficient proximity to conceive was unimaginable They took a similar arm s length approach when it came to raising their children To wake Milo up in the morning his father would give the baseboard of his bed a hearty kick One morning when Milo was eleven and his sister Angie was twelve she came running to the breakfast table in tears Mom I m dying she cried Irene s eyes widened at the blood stained fabric in her daughter s hands You re not dying Go get dressed and we ll discuss this That night she left a package of pads and a pamphlet titled Just Between Us outside Angie s door Three years had passed since then and they still hadn t discussed it Irene and Walt were never abusive but always uncompromising Their home was regimented by a set of rules and routines that felt more reliable and constant than any standard measure of time During the weekdays Irene cooked at home and the family adhered to a strict vegetarian diet They were allowed to eat meat on the weekends but only ever at a restaurant and only if that restaurant had linen napkins and tablecloths Milo suspected the touch of flesh was too much for his mother so she preferred to leave it to the professionals Saturday evenings were reserved for cribbage and backgammon and every Sunday Milo and Angie dutifully piled in the car for Father Randall s morning service where they learned to shore up their vulnerable minds like castles under siege On Sunday afternoons Milo s father would take him to the country club for lunch They never actually golfed but instead would sit in silence watching the green until the waiter came to take their order It was an unspoken agreement between the two 22 23
that this lunch came with no restrictions so Milo would always order chicken strips and a chocolate milkshake Watching his father out of the corner of his eye Milo would await his subtle nod to the waiter as if Walt was agreeing to buy his fourteenyear old son a cocktail or a lap dance As soon as he finished his milkshake Milo would ask to go see the koi pond in the lobby Milo could tell his father was uncomfortable with this much one on one time and he always seemed relieved when Milo asked to be excused Walt would stride importantly over to his colleagues drinking sidecars and smoking in the bar room and Milo would trot down the lobby steps to the tiered gray fountain The fountain was home to twelve koi fish all of them gloriously plump and brightly speckled with orange and white They slid over and under one another with ease as if they didn t notice or mind each other s gummy bodies pressing in on all sides obstructing their unarmored gills and puckered mouths The rich earthy smell of the water mixed with the club s harsh floor cleaner Sometimes Milo would submerge his hand and pet their slimy backs until a passing staff member would yell at him and gesture violently to the DON T TOUCH sign they had put up especially for him From his table in the dining room Walt would wave to Milo and signal that it was time to go They drove home in silence both sensing the approaching melancholy that returned every Sunday evening as the alarm clocks reset and the week began again Milo and Angie trudged down the sycamore lined driveway kicking up loose gravel in miniature bursts of shrapnel As their bus rounded the bend and sighed open to admit the two travelers Milo inhaled the smell of rubber and graphite etched into vinyl seats He spotted Brian at their usual spot back left corner next to the window that was permanently jammed open Milo and Brian had met two years earlier in Mrs Schiller s 7th grade homeroom drawn together by a shared disdain for the free trade of baseball cards and chewing gum that took place during that hour Milo simply thought they were bad investments baseball cards left you penniless and gum gave you cavities For Brian it was more about resenting their classmates who had stopped talking to him after his father died the year before They treated him like patient zero never getting too close in case his tragedy somehow rubbed off on them Excerpt from the introduction of Present Absence History Literature and Hiroshima in Cat s Cradle and Ceremony Critical Thesis by Maeva O Brien When Harry Truman announced on August 6 1945 that America had destroyed the city of Hiroshima Japan with the single blast of a new and terrifying weapon his language was clearly awed at the task of entering the bomb into common discourse It is an atomic bomb he told the American public It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East 1 His statement first drafted by the military s recruited science journalist William Laurence three weeks previously emphasized America s military might in language verging on the beatific exalted the great scientific and technological achievement of the bomb underlined the patriotism and unity that brought all Americans together in delivering this powerful blow and sold the public on the bomb with rhetoric of consumerism It simultaneously contained no information about the bomb s human casualties and the potential long term effects of radiation concealed the process behind the decision to drop the bomb and ignored urgent questions about the necessity of using it at all and about the choice of a densely civilian populated city as a target 2 From that moment forward Hiroshima registered deeply in the American conscience where it has maintained a fraught position ever since 3 From then until now Hiroshima has typically stood for one of three things an admittedly horrific but ultimately justified means of winning a costly war the destructive potential of nuclear weapons or a symbol of a kind of warfare that must never happen again 4 But despite Hiroshima s permanent political resonance in many ways the events of the bombings Writing into the void of American literature around Hiroshima in the face of psychic numbing cultural trauma and the threat of apocalypse presents unique 5 Lifton and Mitchell Hiroshima in America xiii 6 Boyer By the Bomb s Early Light xix 1 Press release by the White House August 6 1945 Truman Library 2 Farrell Making Common Sense of the Bomb 26 29 Farrell emphasizes the ways in which Truman s rhetoric written by Laurence a master of public relations built on the common sense of discourses already established in American culture including those of nationalism patriotism scientific progress military necessity and strategy and consumerism 8 3 Boyer Exotic Resonances 144 4 Ibid 144 145 148 24 themselves have not been comfortably integrated into America s national consciousness in the seventy years since they occurred Lifton observes in 1995 that instead of attempting to come to terms with the atomic bombing on all its levels of meaning Americans continue to treat Hiroshima above all else as a threat to our national self image 5 He argues that while Hiroshima is a familiar part of American history since 1945 Americans have exhibited marked resistance to reflecting critically on their country s culpability in the nuclear deaths of at least 225 000 Japanese civilians Instead American responses to the bomb have remained remarkably stagnant such an extreme effect that Boyer shows how despite massive proliferations of images and rhetoric related to the atomic bomb that occur any time the nuclear threat rises in the American consciousness All the major elements of our contemporary engagement with the nuclear reality took shape literally within days of Hiroshima 6 These elements are focused distinctly outward and forward away from American guilt and historical examination and instead overwhelmingly toward the potential for nuclear devastation on America s own land a terrifying prospect that somehow fails to acknowledge America s use of nuclear force on the territory of another nation the necessity of overcoming or mitigating the fears this possibility provokes and the importance of building America s nuclear arsenal as a deterrent in case of future nuclear war 7 This response was constructed efficiently and lastingly in the immediate aftermath of the bomb s use and with the static nature of its narrative came an enduring resistance to deep explorations of the past 8 7 Ibid xix Boyer provides exhaustive coverage in By the Bomb s Early Light of the various mediums and messages of nuclear discourse in the immediate postwar period 1945 1950 He argues that the kinds of cultural engagement with Hiroshima that developed during these years may be traced through every period of nuclear discourse between 1945 and his work s publication in 1985 with little to no substantive evolution in meaning or tone 8 Lifton and Mitchell s Hiroshima in America A Half Century of Denial 1995 which expanded Lifton s term psychic numbing to encompass broad cultural commentary provides a fascinating insightful and rigorouslyresearched account of the development dispersal defense and continued legacy of the America narrative of Hiroshima 25
that this lunch came with no restrictions so Milo would always order chicken strips and a chocolate milkshake Watching his father out of the corner of his eye Milo would await his subtle nod to the waiter as if Walt was agreeing to buy his fourteenyear old son a cocktail or a lap dance As soon as he finished his milkshake Milo would ask to go see the koi pond in the lobby Milo could tell his father was uncomfortable with this much one on one time and he always seemed relieved when Milo asked to be excused Walt would stride importantly over to his colleagues drinking sidecars and smoking in the bar room and Milo would trot down the lobby steps to the tiered gray fountain The fountain was home to twelve koi fish all of them gloriously plump and brightly speckled with orange and white They slid over and under one another with ease as if they didn t notice or mind each other s gummy bodies pressing in on all sides obstructing their unarmored gills and puckered mouths The rich earthy smell of the water mixed with the club s harsh floor cleaner Sometimes Milo would submerge his hand and pet their slimy backs until a passing staff member would yell at him and gesture violently to the DON T TOUCH sign they had put up especially for him From his table in the dining room Walt would wave to Milo and signal that it was time to go They drove home in silence both sensing the approaching melancholy that returned every Sunday evening as the alarm clocks reset and the week began again Milo and Angie trudged down the sycamore lined driveway kicking up loose gravel in miniature bursts of shrapnel As their bus rounded the bend and sighed open to admit the two travelers Milo inhaled the smell of rubber and graphite etched into vinyl seats He spotted Brian at their usual spot back left corner next to the window that was permanently jammed open Milo and Brian had met two years earlier in Mrs Schiller s 7th grade homeroom drawn together by a shared disdain for the free trade of baseball cards and chewing gum that took place during that hour Milo simply thought they were bad investments baseball cards left you penniless and gum gave you cavities For Brian it was more about resenting their classmates who had stopped talking to him after his father died the year before They treated him like patient zero never getting too close in case his tragedy somehow rubbed off on them Excerpt from the introduction of Present Absence History Literature and Hiroshima in Cat s Cradle and Ceremony Critical Thesis by Maeva O Brien When Harry Truman announced on August 6 1945 that America had destroyed the city of Hiroshima Japan with the single blast of a new and terrifying weapon his language was clearly awed at the task of entering the bomb into common discourse It is an atomic bomb he told the American public It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East 1 His statement first drafted by the military s recruited science journalist William Laurence three weeks previously emphasized America s military might in language verging on the beatific exalted the great scientific and technological achievement of the bomb underlined the patriotism and unity that brought all Americans together in delivering this powerful blow and sold the public on the bomb with rhetoric of consumerism It simultaneously contained no information about the bomb s human casualties and the potential long term effects of radiation concealed the process behind the decision to drop the bomb and ignored urgent questions about the necessity of using it at all and about the choice of a densely civilian populated city as a target 2 From that moment forward Hiroshima registered deeply in the American conscience where it has maintained a fraught position ever since 3 From then until now Hiroshima has typically stood for one of three things an admittedly horrific but ultimately justified means of winning a costly war the destructive potential of nuclear weapons or a symbol of a kind of warfare that must never happen again 4 But despite Hiroshima s permanent political resonance in many ways the events of the bombings Writing into the void of American literature around Hiroshima in the face of psychic numbing cultural trauma and the threat of apocalypse presents unique 5 Lifton and Mitchell Hiroshima in America xiii 6 Boyer By the Bomb s Early Light xix 1 Press release by the White House August 6 1945 Truman Library 2 Farrell Making Common Sense of the Bomb 26 29 Farrell emphasizes the ways in which Truman s rhetoric written by Laurence a master of public relations built on the common sense of discourses already established in American culture including those of nationalism patriotism scientific progress military necessity and strategy and consumerism 8 3 Boyer Exotic Resonances 144 4 Ibid 144 145 148 24 themselves have not been comfortably integrated into America s national consciousness in the seventy years since they occurred Lifton observes in 1995 that instead of attempting to come to terms with the atomic bombing on all its levels of meaning Americans continue to treat Hiroshima above all else as a threat to our national self image 5 He argues that while Hiroshima is a familiar part of American history since 1945 Americans have exhibited marked resistance to reflecting critically on their country s culpability in the nuclear deaths of at least 225 000 Japanese civilians Instead American responses to the bomb have remained remarkably stagnant such an extreme effect that Boyer shows how despite massive proliferations of images and rhetoric related to the atomic bomb that occur any time the nuclear threat rises in the American consciousness All the major elements of our contemporary engagement with the nuclear reality took shape literally within days of Hiroshima 6 These elements are focused distinctly outward and forward away from American guilt and historical examination and instead overwhelmingly toward the potential for nuclear devastation on America s own land a terrifying prospect that somehow fails to acknowledge America s use of nuclear force on the territory of another nation the necessity of overcoming or mitigating the fears this possibility provokes and the importance of building America s nuclear arsenal as a deterrent in case of future nuclear war 7 This response was constructed efficiently and lastingly in the immediate aftermath of the bomb s use and with the static nature of its narrative came an enduring resistance to deep explorations of the past 8 7 Ibid xix Boyer provides exhaustive coverage in By the Bomb s Early Light of the various mediums and messages of nuclear discourse in the immediate postwar period 1945 1950 He argues that the kinds of cultural engagement with Hiroshima that developed during these years may be traced through every period of nuclear discourse between 1945 and his work s publication in 1985 with little to no substantive evolution in meaning or tone 8 Lifton and Mitchell s Hiroshima in America A Half Century of Denial 1995 which expanded Lifton s term psychic numbing to encompass broad cultural commentary provides a fascinating insightful and rigorouslyresearched account of the development dispersal defense and continued legacy of the America narrative of Hiroshima 25
challenges for narrative representation Hersey s Hiroshima demonstrates the pressures of a moral mandate placed on narrative works grappling with the volatile historical stakes of America s bombings of Japan Johnson s Fiskadoro on the other hand voids all historical representation to demonstrate how depictions of nuclear apocalypse inherently destabilize the future of literature as a whole Cat s Cradle and Ceremony pursue a representation of Hiroshima that falls somewhere in the middle resolving the challenges of representing the bomb in simultaneously historical and literary fashions by aligning their studies of Hiroshima with inventive sense making frameworks and experiments on temporal structure within the novel form Neither ends with a promise that apocalypse can be avoided both see Hiroshima as a precedent setter that brings humanity closer to its own destruction However both works maintain a dogged faith that proximity to the end of history is not the end of meaning and that literature can play a crucial role in bringing America to terms with Hiroshima and overcoming its absence Excerpt from Hotel Esperanza Fiction Thesis by Emily Ott The Coworkers Katherine Sandel had assumed that her coworker s shirt was light blue but as she stood beside him at the check in desk where her eyes had adjusted to the lobby s natural light as compared to the grim florescence of the airport she noted that the shirt was light blue only by illusion for a darker blue thread was lightened by an interwoven white thread The fabric looked papery to her like an overly starched table cloth and was taut around her coworker s armpits so that when he extended his arm toward the receptionist with the company credit card in hand it looked as though the seam might split and detach the sleeve from the rest of the garment The shirt was ballooned in several lumps above his belt where his excessive girth exacerbated a sloppy tuck in job His hair was shiny from a natural oily constitution and a moderate sweating condition If Katherine Sandel had been standing just a foot closer to him she would have encountered a nearly visible orb of body odor tangled up with a very common men s cologne 26 Despite these less than favorable physical features Katherine Sandel was not the sort of person to use these qualities toward an assessment of Mike Finnerty s personal character for she too suffering from frequent and horrific cases of acne well into her twenties understood the plight of the inconsiderate tendencies of our human bodies While Mike Finnerty checked into his room Katherine in that same passive way she had observed two men load bloated suitcases underneath the airplane scanned the lobby of Hotel Esperanza It was spacious but most of the space was dead space killed by the presence of a single tacky circular fountain in the center of the lobby Katherine felt that the fountain was too small and that it infected the entire lobby with a sour smell of mildew and chlorine she had experienced that smell as a child whenever she walked past the fountain in a mall near her home The fountain in the lobby of Hotel Esperanza was a solo waterspout emerging from a birdbath like structure with no additional features She imagined how it had gotten there Hotel Esperanza had probably hired an interior decorator with a resume printed on card stock paper This resume declared that he an acclaimed interior designer though with no verified credits to his name specialized in hotel aesthetic The fountain he had said would be a wonderful centerpiece and it would absolutely emphasize the Spanish inspiration behind Hotel Esperanza The fountain had probably arrived after said decorator had been paid and so by the time the owners of Hotel Esperanza had realized the unimpressive size of the fountain it had been too late the specialist of hotel interior decorating had already boarded his flight to Pasadena Katherine was handed a plastic key card to a room selected by her employer for its moderate price The ceremony with which Katherine was handed the room key reminded her of receiving the key to a new home Tart wrappers and two metal lunch boxes sitting on the kitchen table at four in the afternoon every weekday when the kids got home from elementary school Home did not have a shampoo conditioner body wash and cream bottle that lasted for only two showers Home did not have a small hair dryer mounted on the wall beside the sink Home did not have a white terrycloth robe hanging in the closet The robe wasn t hers for Katherine did not wear a robe but for whatever reason a robe that had been worn by a stranger before her and hopefully washed since was supposed to make her feel more at home Katherine did not all together mind hotels or business trips and neither did Mike Finnerty If the sheets were clean and the kids far away Katherine was a content woman If the bed was soft and the mini bar stocked with snacks Mike was a happy man Mike had never traveled with Katherine in fact it was Mike s first business trip as an employee of Luna a Massachusetts based flooring company but so far the trip had been fine Mike had fallen asleep on the five hour flight to a municipal airport outside their destination of El Dorado Arkansas His head had slowly fallen onto Katherine s shoulder twice before he did that strange thing where one jerks awake the body thinking for whatever reason that its head was about to fall from its shoulders He had cleared his throat hoping that she had not noticed though she obviously had At the end of the flight while about to deplane Mike had said to Katherine You have supple shoulders and he said it with only a half joking tone Katherine seemed unmoved by the other half of what that tone implied At thirty seven Mike compulsively checked any woman s left hand when he knew he would be near her for more than an hour and Katherine s had been bare At the cab Mike took Katherine s bag from her hands making sure to brush his fingers against her arm and placed it in the trunk for her Katherine offered a simple Thank you and ducked into the car But Katherine s three bedroom home in the suburbs of Boston was nothing at all like the single serving cubicle she was supposed to call home for the next two nights All that separated the headboard of her bed from the headboard of a complete stranger crying on the telephone next door were two pieces of drywall and very inadequate insulation Home had dog toys and dirty socks everywhere Home had Pop 27
challenges for narrative representation Hersey s Hiroshima demonstrates the pressures of a moral mandate placed on narrative works grappling with the volatile historical stakes of America s bombings of Japan Johnson s Fiskadoro on the other hand voids all historical representation to demonstrate how depictions of nuclear apocalypse inherently destabilize the future of literature as a whole Cat s Cradle and Ceremony pursue a representation of Hiroshima that falls somewhere in the middle resolving the challenges of representing the bomb in simultaneously historical and literary fashions by aligning their studies of Hiroshima with inventive sense making frameworks and experiments on temporal structure within the novel form Neither ends with a promise that apocalypse can be avoided both see Hiroshima as a precedent setter that brings humanity closer to its own destruction However both works maintain a dogged faith that proximity to the end of history is not the end of meaning and that literature can play a crucial role in bringing America to terms with Hiroshima and overcoming its absence Excerpt from Hotel Esperanza Fiction Thesis by Emily Ott The Coworkers Katherine Sandel had assumed that her coworker s shirt was light blue but as she stood beside him at the check in desk where her eyes had adjusted to the lobby s natural light as compared to the grim florescence of the airport she noted that the shirt was light blue only by illusion for a darker blue thread was lightened by an interwoven white thread The fabric looked papery to her like an overly starched table cloth and was taut around her coworker s armpits so that when he extended his arm toward the receptionist with the company credit card in hand it looked as though the seam might split and detach the sleeve from the rest of the garment The shirt was ballooned in several lumps above his belt where his excessive girth exacerbated a sloppy tuck in job His hair was shiny from a natural oily constitution and a moderate sweating condition If Katherine Sandel had been standing just a foot closer to him she would have encountered a nearly visible orb of body odor tangled up with a very common men s cologne 26 Despite these less than favorable physical features Katherine Sandel was not the sort of person to use these qualities toward an assessment of Mike Finnerty s personal character for she too suffering from frequent and horrific cases of acne well into her twenties understood the plight of the inconsiderate tendencies of our human bodies While Mike Finnerty checked into his room Katherine in that same passive way she had observed two men load bloated suitcases underneath the airplane scanned the lobby of Hotel Esperanza It was spacious but most of the space was dead space killed by the presence of a single tacky circular fountain in the center of the lobby Katherine felt that the fountain was too small and that it infected the entire lobby with a sour smell of mildew and chlorine she had experienced that smell as a child whenever she walked past the fountain in a mall near her home The fountain in the lobby of Hotel Esperanza was a solo waterspout emerging from a birdbath like structure with no additional features She imagined how it had gotten there Hotel Esperanza had probably hired an interior decorator with a resume printed on card stock paper This resume declared that he an acclaimed interior designer though with no verified credits to his name specialized in hotel aesthetic The fountain he had said would be a wonderful centerpiece and it would absolutely emphasize the Spanish inspiration behind Hotel Esperanza The fountain had probably arrived after said decorator had been paid and so by the time the owners of Hotel Esperanza had realized the unimpressive size of the fountain it had been too late the specialist of hotel interior decorating had already boarded his flight to Pasadena Katherine was handed a plastic key card to a room selected by her employer for its moderate price The ceremony with which Katherine was handed the room key reminded her of receiving the key to a new home Tart wrappers and two metal lunch boxes sitting on the kitchen table at four in the afternoon every weekday when the kids got home from elementary school Home did not have a shampoo conditioner body wash and cream bottle that lasted for only two showers Home did not have a small hair dryer mounted on the wall beside the sink Home did not have a white terrycloth robe hanging in the closet The robe wasn t hers for Katherine did not wear a robe but for whatever reason a robe that had been worn by a stranger before her and hopefully washed since was supposed to make her feel more at home Katherine did not all together mind hotels or business trips and neither did Mike Finnerty If the sheets were clean and the kids far away Katherine was a content woman If the bed was soft and the mini bar stocked with snacks Mike was a happy man Mike had never traveled with Katherine in fact it was Mike s first business trip as an employee of Luna a Massachusetts based flooring company but so far the trip had been fine Mike had fallen asleep on the five hour flight to a municipal airport outside their destination of El Dorado Arkansas His head had slowly fallen onto Katherine s shoulder twice before he did that strange thing where one jerks awake the body thinking for whatever reason that its head was about to fall from its shoulders He had cleared his throat hoping that she had not noticed though she obviously had At the end of the flight while about to deplane Mike had said to Katherine You have supple shoulders and he said it with only a half joking tone Katherine seemed unmoved by the other half of what that tone implied At thirty seven Mike compulsively checked any woman s left hand when he knew he would be near her for more than an hour and Katherine s had been bare At the cab Mike took Katherine s bag from her hands making sure to brush his fingers against her arm and placed it in the trunk for her Katherine offered a simple Thank you and ducked into the car But Katherine s three bedroom home in the suburbs of Boston was nothing at all like the single serving cubicle she was supposed to call home for the next two nights All that separated the headboard of her bed from the headboard of a complete stranger crying on the telephone next door were two pieces of drywall and very inadequate insulation Home had dog toys and dirty socks everywhere Home had Pop 27
Excerpt from The Candle is Forever Learning to Sing Poetry Thesis by Miles Hewitt Two lines of verse teacher Two lines of verse teacher two lines of verse omens are good the door is unlocked when I come up to it I pull sticky notes clean from my wall like insects I took everything from Zbigniew Herbert like you told me to I even took his name and now I hold the beating heart of Zbigniew Herbert framed by my other treasures the lost jar an empty frame cashews dark eons of matter the yellow of leaves barely gone the stream below the insane asylum all all I must possess even that which you do not still I sit at the foot of the dark shape I found it again today in the pitch black Magic quatrains I my rational mind assuring me I am my unconscious emanating red stripes telling me I m not pretentious soul poetry cast yourselves before the running deer II what is magic do I believe in it my unconscious knows I must provide an image of the unconscious but already I have see III this is the first time I ve listened to NPR news the evening news newsprint I must write the poem beyond translation in 3000 years I haven t done it yet IV praise all wind for I have seen myself before her corroded on the long beach before my time praise her praise her Now hold the rainbow dark as I go down the ladder of light Now hold the rainbow dark as I go down the ladder of light help me succeed you will never have to follow two forms meld falling into one cry mercy cry mercy who breaks the bottle filled with lavender and where is the spiked and hungry morningstar leading and where can the messenger meet the final rain the new zodiac cowers my lungs disseminate a page full of gestures the geode tilts back and forth growing out its beards and the silver of underground bridges I have forgotten my nature I am exploring dualities the broken van shuttles tourists to the fall leaves everywhere whispering make it again I go there with my backpack it is almost mine days go on innumerable against the sand hidden forces seize power beneath their own feet and it is taken back again the font of pride the font of pride is broken they croon to their war ponies only you can ride with me until I vanish oh I see you appearing now with the yellow labrador called shadow is it true you go on repeating forever True how I ve Avoided the subject True how I ve avoided the subject the subject is all around on every mode of transportation and how I ve ignored the way you taught me listening in three dimensions how I ve ignored the ends of a branch and how we rediscover our dead crudely soft and dead turning them over and how we plead with only imagination to cross back I suspect you lead out my true self in the mirror it is impossible to hold you at arm s length even standing off the green highway I long to lay my head on the flower and six more of them cushioned appear how can I make you more present against this psychedelic background how long will I call out in the night while you save up all your one liners flower storm let me in I see the way you move individual all at once individual 28 29
Excerpt from The Candle is Forever Learning to Sing Poetry Thesis by Miles Hewitt Two lines of verse teacher Two lines of verse teacher two lines of verse omens are good the door is unlocked when I come up to it I pull sticky notes clean from my wall like insects I took everything from Zbigniew Herbert like you told me to I even took his name and now I hold the beating heart of Zbigniew Herbert framed by my other treasures the lost jar an empty frame cashews dark eons of matter the yellow of leaves barely gone the stream below the insane asylum all all I must possess even that which you do not still I sit at the foot of the dark shape I found it again today in the pitch black Magic quatrains I my rational mind assuring me I am my unconscious emanating red stripes telling me I m not pretentious soul poetry cast yourselves before the running deer II what is magic do I believe in it my unconscious knows I must provide an image of the unconscious but already I have see III this is the first time I ve listened to NPR news the evening news newsprint I must write the poem beyond translation in 3000 years I haven t done it yet IV praise all wind for I have seen myself before her corroded on the long beach before my time praise her praise her Now hold the rainbow dark as I go down the ladder of light Now hold the rainbow dark as I go down the ladder of light help me succeed you will never have to follow two forms meld falling into one cry mercy cry mercy who breaks the bottle filled with lavender and where is the spiked and hungry morningstar leading and where can the messenger meet the final rain the new zodiac cowers my lungs disseminate a page full of gestures the geode tilts back and forth growing out its beards and the silver of underground bridges I have forgotten my nature I am exploring dualities the broken van shuttles tourists to the fall leaves everywhere whispering make it again I go there with my backpack it is almost mine days go on innumerable against the sand hidden forces seize power beneath their own feet and it is taken back again the font of pride the font of pride is broken they croon to their war ponies only you can ride with me until I vanish oh I see you appearing now with the yellow labrador called shadow is it true you go on repeating forever True how I ve Avoided the subject True how I ve avoided the subject the subject is all around on every mode of transportation and how I ve ignored the way you taught me listening in three dimensions how I ve ignored the ends of a branch and how we rediscover our dead crudely soft and dead turning them over and how we plead with only imagination to cross back I suspect you lead out my true self in the mirror it is impossible to hold you at arm s length even standing off the green highway I long to lay my head on the flower and six more of them cushioned appear how can I make you more present against this psychedelic background how long will I call out in the night while you save up all your one liners flower storm let me in I see the way you move individual all at once individual 28 29
We Remember Barbara Lewalski 1931 2018 From Gordon Teskey 28 March 2018 At her retirement in 2011 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski was William R Kenan Jr Professor of English Literature and of History of Literature after which she was William R Kenan Jr Research Professor Her first academic appointment was at Wellesley College 1954 56 She then taught at Brown University until coming to Harvard in 1982 Over her fifty year career Barbara was the preeminent Milton scholar of the later twentieth and earlier twenty first centuries equaling the reputation of Harvard s Douglas Bush d 1983 the preeminent Miltonist of the middle twentieth century A vital intellectual presence in seventeenth century studies generally and a pioneer of the scholarly study of women s writings in that period Barbara was also an exceptional mentor to generations of students especially in the training and mentoring of women scholars many of whom now serve at the top of the profession She was named a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 No less than three times she won the Milton Society of America s James Holly Hanford Award for the best book or article of the year In 1977 only a decade into her career the Milton Society conferred on her its highest distinction Honored Scholar In 2016 the mighty Renaissance Society of America gave her its highest honor the Paul Oscar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award 30 Barbara took her Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Emporia State University in 1951 In 1956 she took her Ph D from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Ernest Sirluck a decisive figure in modern scholarship on Milton s prose Sirluck s legendary rigor would be the model for Barbara s book camp training of her own graduate students Her first book Milton s Brief Epic 1966 on Milton s Paradise Regained with its multi language survey of shorter epic poems composed in the Renaissance remains a classic in the field of Milton studies Donne s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise appeared in 1973 In 1979 Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century English Lyric established the paradigm for the study of the religious lyric in the period It has influenced the study of early American literature as well In 1985 at a time when close reading and genre theory were unfashionable Barbara published the award winning Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms a revelatory analysis of the layered complexity of Milton s art In 1993 when enthusiasm over women writers in the seventeenth century was rising Barbara published a book that transformed this enthusiasm into a research field Writing Women in Jacobean England This was followed by a scholarly edition The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght 1996 Barbara inspired a younger generation of scholars to discover new authors and to establish the texts of their works according to professional standards She never lost sight of the reason for doing so Amidst the gallons of ink spilled over Aemilia Lanyer s possibly being the Shakespeare s dark mistress or indeed Shakespeare himself Barbara wisely observed that such controversy distracted from Lanyer s considerable poetic achievement Continuing her work as an editor of seventeenth century texts Barbara edited Paradise Lost in 2007 In 2012 she completed a still more difficult and complex edition of all Milton s Shorter Poems her contribution to the still emerging multi volume Oxford edition which will be the first complete Milton since the 1930s The capstone of Barbara s career and the work by which she is widely known is the magisterial John Milton A Critical Biography published in 2000 which supersedes the first modern scholarly biography of Milton by William Riley Parker 1968 It is comparable in stature to the six volume nineteenth century biography by David Masson long considered the greatest study of Milton ever Readers and reviewers have commented on the brilliance of her decision to pause continually in the course of her narrative of Milton s role in such events as the English Revolution to give discerning aesthetically sophisticated and even leisurely appreciations of the poems Especially noteworthy are her discussions of the art and argument of Paradise Lost of the moral seriousness and wit of its sequel Paradise Regained and of the passionate tragic drama Samson Agonistes Like Masson this study will be read as long as Milton is Form and Reform in Renaissance England Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski was published in 2000 a high level scholarly tribute from many of her former students After her death one scholar wrote Barbara excelled in four distinct areas of Milton studies as teacher critic biographer and editor Other great Miltonists have achieved eminence in two or even three of these but Barbara was very special indeed in achieving all four She stood out for a fifth achievement the rarest of all which she shared with the greatest of literary critics Samuel Johnson good sense exercised at the level of genius There are of course many more publications some of them surprising such as Federico Fellini s Purgatorio 1964 an essay on that director s very recent film 8 1963 soon to be a classic Tracing a series of allusions to Dante s Purgatorio which follow a similar allusions to the Inferno in the earlier film La Dolce Vita 1960 Barbara describes the final scene in which the hapless director megaphone in hand leads his unruly cast down from the launch tower constructed for the climactic scene of his disastrous movie Transfigured in white his characters fall into a circular dance while the director refuses to impose a final ordering upon them This vision of human harmony and sharing Barbara says is an appropriate close for the modern Purgatorio What one may well wonder will Fellini s Paradiso be Barbara wrote these words at the outset of her own calling as captain and chief ringleader for the next five decades of seventeenth century literature studies A great scholar and teacher has passed from among us 31
We Remember Barbara Lewalski 1931 2018 From Gordon Teskey 28 March 2018 At her retirement in 2011 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski was William R Kenan Jr Professor of English Literature and of History of Literature after which she was William R Kenan Jr Research Professor Her first academic appointment was at Wellesley College 1954 56 She then taught at Brown University until coming to Harvard in 1982 Over her fifty year career Barbara was the preeminent Milton scholar of the later twentieth and earlier twenty first centuries equaling the reputation of Harvard s Douglas Bush d 1983 the preeminent Miltonist of the middle twentieth century A vital intellectual presence in seventeenth century studies generally and a pioneer of the scholarly study of women s writings in that period Barbara was also an exceptional mentor to generations of students especially in the training and mentoring of women scholars many of whom now serve at the top of the profession She was named a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 No less than three times she won the Milton Society of America s James Holly Hanford Award for the best book or article of the year In 1977 only a decade into her career the Milton Society conferred on her its highest distinction Honored Scholar In 2016 the mighty Renaissance Society of America gave her its highest honor the Paul Oscar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award 30 Barbara took her Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Emporia State University in 1951 In 1956 she took her Ph D from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Ernest Sirluck a decisive figure in modern scholarship on Milton s prose Sirluck s legendary rigor would be the model for Barbara s book camp training of her own graduate students Her first book Milton s Brief Epic 1966 on Milton s Paradise Regained with its multi language survey of shorter epic poems composed in the Renaissance remains a classic in the field of Milton studies Donne s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise appeared in 1973 In 1979 Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century English Lyric established the paradigm for the study of the religious lyric in the period It has influenced the study of early American literature as well In 1985 at a time when close reading and genre theory were unfashionable Barbara published the award winning Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms a revelatory analysis of the layered complexity of Milton s art In 1993 when enthusiasm over women writers in the seventeenth century was rising Barbara published a book that transformed this enthusiasm into a research field Writing Women in Jacobean England This was followed by a scholarly edition The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght 1996 Barbara inspired a younger generation of scholars to discover new authors and to establish the texts of their works according to professional standards She never lost sight of the reason for doing so Amidst the gallons of ink spilled over Aemilia Lanyer s possibly being the Shakespeare s dark mistress or indeed Shakespeare himself Barbara wisely observed that such controversy distracted from Lanyer s considerable poetic achievement Continuing her work as an editor of seventeenth century texts Barbara edited Paradise Lost in 2007 In 2012 she completed a still more difficult and complex edition of all Milton s Shorter Poems her contribution to the still emerging multi volume Oxford edition which will be the first complete Milton since the 1930s The capstone of Barbara s career and the work by which she is widely known is the magisterial John Milton A Critical Biography published in 2000 which supersedes the first modern scholarly biography of Milton by William Riley Parker 1968 It is comparable in stature to the six volume nineteenth century biography by David Masson long considered the greatest study of Milton ever Readers and reviewers have commented on the brilliance of her decision to pause continually in the course of her narrative of Milton s role in such events as the English Revolution to give discerning aesthetically sophisticated and even leisurely appreciations of the poems Especially noteworthy are her discussions of the art and argument of Paradise Lost of the moral seriousness and wit of its sequel Paradise Regained and of the passionate tragic drama Samson Agonistes Like Masson this study will be read as long as Milton is Form and Reform in Renaissance England Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski was published in 2000 a high level scholarly tribute from many of her former students After her death one scholar wrote Barbara excelled in four distinct areas of Milton studies as teacher critic biographer and editor Other great Miltonists have achieved eminence in two or even three of these but Barbara was very special indeed in achieving all four She stood out for a fifth achievement the rarest of all which she shared with the greatest of literary critics Samuel Johnson good sense exercised at the level of genius There are of course many more publications some of them surprising such as Federico Fellini s Purgatorio 1964 an essay on that director s very recent film 8 1963 soon to be a classic Tracing a series of allusions to Dante s Purgatorio which follow a similar allusions to the Inferno in the earlier film La Dolce Vita 1960 Barbara describes the final scene in which the hapless director megaphone in hand leads his unruly cast down from the launch tower constructed for the climactic scene of his disastrous movie Transfigured in white his characters fall into a circular dance while the director refuses to impose a final ordering upon them This vision of human harmony and sharing Barbara says is an appropriate close for the modern Purgatorio What one may well wonder will Fellini s Paradiso be Barbara wrote these words at the outset of her own calling as captain and chief ringleader for the next five decades of seventeenth century literature studies A great scholar and teacher has passed from among us 31
We Remember Barbara Lewalski 1931 2018 Barbara was a marvelous teacher and all her graduate students it seems adored her But she was also very demanding and didn t hesitate to correct or to question Her knowledge of Milton was unrivaled and she wrote a fine biography of Milton too something that isn t always mentioned Her research and historical arguments were blended with a deep grasp of poetic forms a Miltonist s Miltonist but one who also introduced Milton to countless undergraduates as well Barbara for many years played a key role in History Literature first as Chair and then always as a faculty participant in the Committee on Degrees She was a remarkably faithful colleague in all matters departmental Barbara Lewalski was not only a great Milton scholar but one of my best friends in the Department downto earth sensible good humored dependable in every way She was devoted to Ken and her son to her colleagues and students and to her friends We often had lunch in the Faculty Club talk books not politics and she would tell me about her next cruise to the coast of Africa or wherever Her voice at Department meetings was consistently sane That wasn t always easy under the circumstances Barbara Lewalski was one of the great Milton scholars of the last hundred years As a teacher and well loved colleague she was also warm fiercely loyal direct and sometimes as outspoken about what should go on in the classroom or the department as she was in her scholarly life and in her political life Like Milton himself Barbara was a freedom fighter she stood up for her students especially the more needy ones just as she did for anyone she thought she could help whether here at Harvard or in her adopted home city of Providence where she was an unusually engaged and politically active citizen She was also extremely demanding She knew how to make you know that she was there to help and encourage while at the same time making it abundantly clear that she expected nothing but the best from you In the process she modeled a particular way of being a teacher a scholar a feminist and a human being She also modeled a particular way of being a reader and lover of literature Everything for Barbara was a call to action sometimes to arms and the works of great art she loved best above all Paradise Lost were the works that called to her and to us most fiercely She lived to make the world a better place and in countless ways she succeeded We too are the better for her and the poorer now without her Jim Engell Robert Kiely Nicholas Watson 1956 Receives PhD from University of Chicago 1950 Earns bachelor of science Degree from Kansas State Teachers College 1953 Fullbright Scholarship February 22 1931 Born in Topeka KS 1951 Earns Masters Degree from University of Chicago 32 Joined Brown University faculty 1954 Instructor at Wellesley College 1967 Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship 1966 Publishes Milton s Brief Epic The Genre Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained 1973 Publishes Major poets of the earlier seventeenth century Donne Herbert Vaughan Crashaw Jonson Herrick Marvell Publishes Donne s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise The Creation of a Symbolic Mode 1975 Awarded Explicator Prize 1982 William R Kenan professor of English literature and of history of literature Harvard University 1977 Honored Scholar Milton Society 1979 Publishes Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric Awarded James Russell Lowell Prize Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship I shall always remember the meeting at which Barbara cut through a complex discussion with an irrefutably forceful resolution in response to which only Elaine Scarry spoke Barbara she said promise you will never retire James Simpson 1986 Edits Renaissance genres Essays on theory history and interpretation 1983 Receives James Holly Hanford Award 1980 Elected into the American Academy of Arts Sciences I was so terribly sorry to hear last March that Barbara had left us Barbara was immortal forever vital and forceful forever smiling through her sparkling eyes Her scholarship was from beginning to end monumental informed by dauntingly immense learning and formidable clarity She was one of those extremely rare souls who ALWAYS unerringly unhesitatingly made exactly the right call the Churchill or De Gaulle of our profession She was also a great friend and unfailing support to so very many people Becomes member of the American Philosophical Society 1985 Publishes Paradise lost and the rhetoric of literary form 2001 Publishes The Life of John Milton A Critical Biography 1996 Publishes Writing women in Jacobean England March 2 2018 Died 2016 Awarded the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America 33
We Remember Barbara Lewalski 1931 2018 Barbara was a marvelous teacher and all her graduate students it seems adored her But she was also very demanding and didn t hesitate to correct or to question Her knowledge of Milton was unrivaled and she wrote a fine biography of Milton too something that isn t always mentioned Her research and historical arguments were blended with a deep grasp of poetic forms a Miltonist s Miltonist but one who also introduced Milton to countless undergraduates as well Barbara for many years played a key role in History Literature first as Chair and then always as a faculty participant in the Committee on Degrees She was a remarkably faithful colleague in all matters departmental Barbara Lewalski was not only a great Milton scholar but one of my best friends in the Department downto earth sensible good humored dependable in every way She was devoted to Ken and her son to her colleagues and students and to her friends We often had lunch in the Faculty Club talk books not politics and she would tell me about her next cruise to the coast of Africa or wherever Her voice at Department meetings was consistently sane That wasn t always easy under the circumstances Barbara Lewalski was one of the great Milton scholars of the last hundred years As a teacher and well loved colleague she was also warm fiercely loyal direct and sometimes as outspoken about what should go on in the classroom or the department as she was in her scholarly life and in her political life Like Milton himself Barbara was a freedom fighter she stood up for her students especially the more needy ones just as she did for anyone she thought she could help whether here at Harvard or in her adopted home city of Providence where she was an unusually engaged and politically active citizen She was also extremely demanding She knew how to make you know that she was there to help and encourage while at the same time making it abundantly clear that she expected nothing but the best from you In the process she modeled a particular way of being a teacher a scholar a feminist and a human being She also modeled a particular way of being a reader and lover of literature Everything for Barbara was a call to action sometimes to arms and the works of great art she loved best above all Paradise Lost were the works that called to her and to us most fiercely She lived to make the world a better place and in countless ways she succeeded We too are the better for her and the poorer now without her Jim Engell Robert Kiely Nicholas Watson 1956 Receives PhD from University of Chicago 1950 Earns bachelor of science Degree from Kansas State Teachers College 1953 Fullbright Scholarship February 22 1931 Born in Topeka KS 1951 Earns Masters Degree from University of Chicago 32 Joined Brown University faculty 1954 Instructor at Wellesley College 1967 Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship 1966 Publishes Milton s Brief Epic The Genre Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained 1973 Publishes Major poets of the earlier seventeenth century Donne Herbert Vaughan Crashaw Jonson Herrick Marvell Publishes Donne s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise The Creation of a Symbolic Mode 1975 Awarded Explicator Prize 1982 William R Kenan professor of English literature and of history of literature Harvard University 1977 Honored Scholar Milton Society 1979 Publishes Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric Awarded James Russell Lowell Prize Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship I shall always remember the meeting at which Barbara cut through a complex discussion with an irrefutably forceful resolution in response to which only Elaine Scarry spoke Barbara she said promise you will never retire James Simpson 1986 Edits Renaissance genres Essays on theory history and interpretation 1983 Receives James Holly Hanford Award 1980 Elected into the American Academy of Arts Sciences I was so terribly sorry to hear last March that Barbara had left us Barbara was immortal forever vital and forceful forever smiling through her sparkling eyes Her scholarship was from beginning to end monumental informed by dauntingly immense learning and formidable clarity She was one of those extremely rare souls who ALWAYS unerringly unhesitatingly made exactly the right call the Churchill or De Gaulle of our profession She was also a great friend and unfailing support to so very many people Becomes member of the American Philosophical Society 1985 Publishes Paradise lost and the rhetoric of literary form 2001 Publishes The Life of John Milton A Critical Biography 1996 Publishes Writing women in Jacobean England March 2 2018 Died 2016 Awarded the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America 33
Spring Term Scrapbook 34 35
Spring Term Scrapbook 34 35
Connect to us Harvard University Department of English English_Harvard harvardenglish Aubrey Everett Copy Editor Henry Vega Ortiz Art Direction Design and Photography
