Dana A. Williams’s long-awaited book Toni at Random is a revelatory portrait of the novelist from an unusual vantage point: her innovative and influential work as an editor at Random House from 1971 to 1983. Morrison famously pulled off an unprecedented juggling act, holding a full-time editorial career as one of the very few African American faces in senior roles in the trade publishing world while somehow finding time to complete Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Tar Baby (1981), as her own reputation as a novelist grew. The book raises fascinating questions not only about Morrison’s singular path but about the complex relationship between editorial practice and writerly practice in general, and about the position of African American literature in the US publishing landscape. As a book mainly concerned with the 1970s, Toni at Random can also be read as an intriguing if oblique reflection on the afterlives of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and the extensive efforts at institution building that had emerged in the previous decade, not only in the Black studies and African American studies programs that were founded in colleges and universities around the country but also in Black independent and small-press publishing.
The document published here for the first time, “Group Life and Literature,” is an unfinished late essay by Claude McKay, the vagabond poet and enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance. 1 Although no date is given on the typescript or on the folder in which it resides at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, it was probably written in 1938 or 1939. The reference to Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children , which was published in 1938, as a “recent startling phenomenon,” added by hand on the typescript, means that at least this annotation could not have been made earlier. Despite being professional rivals at the time, notably in their conflicting relations to the Communist Party, McKay and Wright were then both part of the Federal Writers’ Project and worked together in the FWP’s New York City offices (see Cooper 362). As a New Deal program launched by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) agency, the FWP ran from 1936 to 1940 and provided life-sustaining employment to thousands of established and emerging US writers during the latter half of the Great Depression, including, among many others, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Richard Durham, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, and a young Ralph Ellison (who also worked at the New York branch).
This essay examines the turn to a discourse of sustainable development through two novels by Ng & utilde;g & itilde; wa Thiong'o: Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2004). Looking at the specific characters, images, and plotlines from Devil on the Cross that are reworked in Wizard of the Crow, the essay traces the shifts in Ng & utilde;g & itilde;'s thinking on development and the environment across the roughly twenty years separating the two novels. Mapping these moments of rewriting onto the history of sustainable development, which emerged in the same period as a kind of rewriting of prior development paradigms, the essay shows how Ng & utilde;g & itilde;'s literary response to environmental crisis exposes the fantastical modes of thinking at the heart of sustainable development; it also provides a vision of sustainability that challenges mainstream conceptions of what solutions are considered to be-in the words of the mandate given to the World Commission on Environment and Development-"realistic."
This study reveals the paragraph's complexity but limited aesthetic contribution. The general question of the ornament's part in the work of art (through which Jacques Derrida challenges Immanuel Kant) frames the subject and extends previous inquiry on punctuation. Through Charles Peirce I discover three kinds of relations that paragraph divisions emphasize for the reader: autonomy, contrast, and pattern. Two passages from Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and P & eacute;cuchet demonstrate the normal order and wayward play of these relations. The novel's opening passage mixes genres to create a multilayered pastiche of Genesis and naturalism, while the third chapter satirizes a chemistry textbook and reflects on the molecular structure of narration. My formal reading indicates how paragraph indentations ornament a beautifully ironic play of relations that ultimately springs from language and not from the material page.
This essay reexamines the Caribbean mother trope in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean poetry and demonstrates how poets' metapoetic practices in their maternal figurations cultivate a located literariness. Specifically, I investigate Kamau Brathwaite's and Lorna Goodison's revisionary poems, showing how they capitalize on and nurture mother-island symbolism through a foregrounded textuality or artistic reflection. Brathwaite reinvents his mother poems to enact a recursive textuality of locatedness. Goodison reconfigures mothers to magnify their art-cultivating roles, thereby affirming the brilliance of local arts that will in turn confer recognition on the Caribbean locale. Departing from a gender-focused approach that highlights Caribbean women poets' subversion of postcolonial patriarchal archetypes, my reading illuminates the two poets' kinship and continuity in nourishing a local Caribbean tradition through an ecology of revision. Ultimately, I demonstrate the significance of revision as a self-reflexive dimension of a Caribbean poetics of place and contemplate how postcolonial literature fosters a located literariness.
John Ashbery's long poem "The Skaters" can be understood as an exploration of entropy, a multivalent concept that originated in nineteenth-century thermodynamics and had recently gained widespread cultural currency when Ashbery wrote the poem, first in the emergent postwar discourse of information theory and then in its application to a wide array of social and artistic phenomena. This article positions Ashbery's poem as a reflection of the postwar period, when energy and information overlapped, with entropy linking the two. The poem's thematics of entropy becomes a structural metaphor for the poem itself as its production of meaning becomes subjected to steady decay; in the entropic poetics prominently on display in "The Skaters," unassimilable excess and semantic drift are precisely the point as the poem itself becomes an exercise in entropy, a nonproductive form of transfer that privileges waste, scattering, and dissipation over coherence.
This article examines the twentieth-century Macau-based poet Camilo Pessanha's contribution to the Portuguese tradition of maritime literature, an inheritance that writers increasingly mobilized in service of the nationalist project in turn-of-the-century Portugal. Pessanha seized on fluid citational practices that were already latent in iconic lusophone maritime works like Lu & iacute;s de Cam & otilde;es's Os Lus & iacute;adas to awaken the tradition from its late-imperial slumber and recover its sensory primacy. Pessanha's creative metabolization of works by authors such as St & eacute;phane Mallarm & eacute; and Charles Baudelaire overlaid French notions of ennui and ship image onto his nautical lyric, opening up a proverbial sea route for later Portuguese modernists, including Fernando Pessoa. From Pessanha's Franco-Portuguese literary confluence emerges a blue poetics of citation-a poetics that affirms, in a postcolonial key, the fluid and transnational intertextualities inherent to literary seafaring.
Hidden in plain sight in the Beinecke Library’s James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University lies the typescript of “God Sends Sunday,” a hitherto unknown three-act play by the Harlem Renaissance enfant terrible, Wallace Thurman. The 149-page play was only recently added to the collection’s “manuscript miscellany,” and, perhaps also accounting for its status as unknown, it shares the title of the poet Arna Bontemps’s first novel, written as Thurman was writing his God Sends Sunday , sometime between 1929 and 1931. 1 After publishing his novel, Bontemps collaborated with the poet Countee Cullen on a “straight play” of it (Bontemps), which eventually became the Broadway musical St. Louis Woman and then a Federal Theater production for which Langston Hughes was brought on board. 2
