This paper explores embodiment in documentary poetics as a corrective to the homogenizing lens of "lyric poetry" that works to erase, by making abstract, non-standard (non-white) bodies. In particular, it examines the performative aspects of punctuation, line breaks, and stanza patterns in Layli Long Soldier's book Whereas, written in response to the 2009 United States Congress joint resolution to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States. The paper contextualizes the apology and poem within Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The significance of the frontier in American History,” eighteenth and nineteenth-century "dead-Indian" poems, and theories of lyric reading. Layli Long Soldier's Whereas joins other acts of poetic resistance, such as Martha Collins' White Papers, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, and Phillis Wheatley's "On Recollection."
This essay revisits the question of Shakespeare’s contemporaneity in light of the interpretive frameworks that have dominated the last half-century of literary criticism. Beginning with Jan Kott’s assertion that Shakespeare is “our contemporary,” I examine how the Frankfurt School and “French Theory” reshaped Shakespearean studies through Marxist, feminist, queer, postcolonial, and ecocritical lenses. While acknowledging some of the insights these approaches have brought, I also express scepticism toward their ideological excesses, which often obscure Shakespeare’s artistry and meaning. Drawing on examples from the sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, The Tempest, and other plays, I argue for a return to historical-philological methods and for the cultivation of aesthetic wonder in the study of literature. In an age dominated by radical theory, daring to affirm the banality that Shakespeare was a great artist, not a social fighter or a fierce representative of “patriarchy” may itself be a radical act.
The title of our paper is obviously an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous book The Birth of Tragedy (from the Spirit of Music). Our aim is to demonstrate, in the most genuine tradition of cultural studies, that literature has been not only influenced by the economy over centuries, but, in great measure, generated by it. Economic mechanisms, at any time and in any place, have determined the so-called Welt Geist (World Spirit) and are ultimately responsible, among numerous other things, for literature’s coming into being. To support this idea, we are going to use a significant case study – the Victorian Novel, a direct outcome, as it will be shown, of the Industrial Revolution. During the years of industrialization (1760-1840), England, the first industrialized country in history, was transformed essentially (we refer to historical, social, political and cultural transformations), all leading to a new understanding of the artistic mimesis. Literature should no longer imitate reality (Aristotle’s old conviction) but accurately mirror it (the new Victorian belief). An event of such historical magnitude as the Industrial Revolution cannot just be symbolized in works of art but rendered precisely. This is how the pre-modern novel of industrialization was born. The epic genre becomes thus a cognitive instrument rather than merely an entertaining artefact. Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence had certainly something to do with it, too. We shall try to explain why. In short, the fundamental structures of the human mindset – what Socrates calls thymos/thumos or what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel identifies as self-consciousness – are completely modified by industrialization. The impact on nature and function of the novel is therefore huge. Masterpieces like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) or Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and Great Expectations (1861) are “texts made in the image” of the Industrial Revolution. Eventually, they demonstrate how literature comes into being, begotten from the spirit of economy, or how philosophy/ideology precedes creation/creativity.
