Wallace Stevens’s exploration of German cultural elements and figures, including his own heritage, functions as a creative source for his poetry and prose. While his early poetry romanticizes German culture and identity, Stevens grows skeptical in the mid-1930s and 1940s when his references to Germany increasingly inform his questioning of poetry’s collective relevance and function. In several poems including “Martial Cadenza,” “Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion,” and “Imago,” images of Germany provide key points of departure to contemplate the regenerative potential of the poetic imagination in transcending the exigencies of the external world unsettled by war and destruction.
In a surprising variety of fantasy and children’s fiction, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to recent works by Neil Gaiman, characters move between worlds with different cultural and social norms and values. This chapter explores the pedagogical and literary-critical implications of this trope in texts suitable for anglophone-literature curricula in second-language teacher education programs. It focuses on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), a classic work of children’s literature, and Gaiman’s popular children’s and fantasy fiction, Coraline (2002) and American Gods (2001). Narratives of spatial mobility between worlds, the chapter argues, raise questions of intercultural negotiation and competence, and offer ways for instructors and teacher learners to explore the border-traversing potential of the literary imagination.
This dissertation explores the social and political dimensions of aesthetic autonomy as it is given formal expression in Wallace Stevens’s poetry of the 1930s and the early 1940s. Whereas modernist claims to autonomy are often said to rest upon an ideological assertion of art’s detachment from socio-historical concerns, I argue that, in Stevens’s work, autonomy is conceived in relational terms, which gives rise to new lines of interconnection between his poetry and its cultural situation. Written over a period when the political efficacy of literature became a staple of discussion among a myriad of writers and critics, Stevens’s poetry offers an understanding of autonomy not as an escape from, but as a productive condition for imagining alternative forms of engagement with the historical crisis with which it has to reckon. In taking into account the cultural context from which Stevens’s poetics of autonomy emerged, my study aims to highlight the significance of the concept to the poet’s exploration of the tension between aesthetic and social domains, to his imaginative formations of collective agency, and to the vexed relationship between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking. By transposing the theoretical discussion of autonomy into the register of historical scrutiny, I hope to pave the way for a rethinking of autonomy and its relevance to the period’s radical and modernist writing, literary debates, and cultural politics. For this purpose, I draw on recent theories, such as those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, on poetry, politics, and (in)aesthetics, which serve to complicate the working definitions of modernist autonomy as literature’s immunity from the world, and to indicate an alternative path for analyzing its critical and contextual implications.
This paper explores literary-political expressions of solidarity with the rise of African decolonization struggles during the Cold War era, by zooming in on the work of a renowned Turkish poet, Nazm Hikmet Ran. First, I argue that Hikmet's poetry offers transnational solidarities that not only assert the political agency of anticolonial uprisings but also negate the persisting mechanisms of racial and economic oppression after colonial rule. Second, in taking into account Hikmet's active participation in the Afro-Asian Writers' Bureau, I show how his vision of solidarity reveals alternative patterns of correspondence between peripheral sites of modernism and world literature's cross-cultural encounters within the Global South. Lastly, I argue that Hikmet's poetry generates new models of collective agency and solidarity that are imagined both through and against the discourse of the news. His mixture of lyric and documentary components, I argue, calls for close attention to the formal aspects of his discourse of solidarity.
This special issue considers networked cultural responses loosely figured as cultural solidarities in the Global South, on the understanding that mid-twentieth century struggles to end colonialism were addressed within a transnational domain. It takes apartheid South Africa as its point of departure, positioning literature from South Africa within a broadly anti-colonial commons. As they consider works by Alex La Guma, Nazim Hikmet Ran, Athol Fugard, and Todd Matshikiza, among others, our contributorsChristopher J. Lee, Gul Bilge Han, Ashleigh Harris and Andrea Thorpequestion the role of aesthetic forms in constructing long-distance solidarities in a Cold War setting. Mohammad Shabangu's assertion of the necessity of opacity as a counter to the recuperation of the African writer brings such questions into the present, intersecting contemporary debates on world literature. Finally, solidarity is framed in temporal rather than geographical terms in Andrew van der Vlies and Julia Willen's dialogue on reading for hope in the aftermath of failed revolutionary projects.