“The Map Shows Me Where It Is You Are”: Gloria Oden Responds to Elizabeth Bishop Across National Geographic and Rand McNally World Maps

2008 ◽  
pp. 8-35
Author(s):  
Adele J. Haft
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The Other ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
National Geographic ◽  
The World ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Cold Spring ◽  
Technical Achievement

African-American poet Gloria Oden was among those inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s seminal poem “The Map” (1934). In honor of Bishop, Oden wrote two poems about reading maps: “A Private Letter to Brazil” (1957) and “The Map” (ca. 1961). Like May Swenson’s “The Cloud-Mobile,” Oden’s poems overtly pay homage to Bishop. Like Howard Nemerov’s “The Mapmaker on His Art” and Mark Strand’s “The Map,” Oden’s verses reveal that she shares in Bishop’s understanding of the mapmaker’s art: its imaginative power and limitations, its technical achievement and arbitrary nature. Yet Oden’s two poems are far more politically and historically nuanced than Bishop’s “The Map”—or than any of the other map poems written shortly after Bishop won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for her collection opening with “The Map” (Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring). Furthermore, unlike her peers, Oden found inspiration in Bishop’s poem and in an identifiable contemporary map. By comparing both of her poems to Bishop’s original as well as uncovering, with the help of Oden’s own words, the identity of her maps, this paper will demonstrate how Oden’s penetrating critique of two popular 1950s wall maps helped her connect not only with Bishop but also with the world she found reflected in, or absent from, the map.

Listening for the Pictures

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-191
Author(s):  
D. Michael Cheers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
The World ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Many

This essay is inspired by the words of Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago Sun Times photographer John White, who once told me to “listen for the pictures.” His message rang clear but never more so than when in 1990 we were covering the release of Nelson Mandela in Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Town scene was alive and filled with so much vibrance. I was keenly aware that I must not just look, but I must listen, and use all my God-given senses to take it in. I can only describe the moment I started listening to the layer of sound, which was my own clicking camera superimposed on the chorus of sounds that surrounded me as both meta and sonorific. There was a certain rhythm to the sensation I felt in being one with my camera. It transported me to a wonderful place in time where visuals and cadences danced together. I realized there was alchemy in this and in all the other moments and locations I had spent behind a camera developing and exercising that “inner ear” my ancestors, some gone, like Gordon Parks, but others here, like White, taught me to revere. This essay is a snapshot of some of those moments—a proof sheet, if you will—from a life that began, as did the civil rights era, with instances of terror and triumph. This essay chronicles my journey as a young photographer and the many influences that shaped my creative process and eventually my worldview. This essay is an invitation to travel with me through time and see life as my camera and I witnessed it, and to hear and sense the world as I do.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Foley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The World ◽  
American Poet ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Political Radicalism

This introductory chapter proposes that African American poet Jean Toomer's 1923 masterwork (Cane) cannot be understood apart from the upsurge of postwar antiracist political radicalism and its aftermath. Toomer does not enthuse about America as the site of cultural pluralism or future racial amalgamation; rather, it is victory in the class struggle against capitalism and imperialism that will put an end to racial division. The violent class struggles that signaled 1919 as a possible revolutionary conjuncture, coupled with the compensatory ideological paradigms adopted by various political actors and cultural producers as insurgency devolved into quietism, supply not just the context, but the formative matrix, from which Toomer's text emerged. The expectations and desires that were aroused and then quashed in the wake of the Great War and the Russian Revolution constitute a spectre haunting the world of Cane.

Parisian Cake Walks

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davinia Caddy
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The Other ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
The World ◽  
Alternative Reading

The popularity of the cake walk among Parisians in the early 1900s is usually attributed to the dance's assumed racial signification. Scholars have argued that the cake walk, owing to its African American origins, was welcomed by Parisians as iconic of a racial "other," a signifier of the primitive, uncultured, and grotesque. This article proposes an alternative reading, setting the standard scholarly line against other, more subtle impressions of the cake walk's cultural import. A consideration of popular response to the dance--on stage, on film, and in the circus arena--reveals Parisian tastes not only for distinct styles of gesture but for American chic, athleticism, and popular participation, as well as the world of the "other." These connotations invite us to consider afresh what is perhaps the most celebrated cake walk of the period, Debussy's "Golliwogg's cake walk" (1908), known particularly for its quotation of Wagner's Tristan. Debussy's piece, I argue, has a more complex significance than that of a mere canvas on which to poke fun at Wagner or a straightforward reference to a minstrel doll. By means of various cultural and aesthetic nuances, it suggests a persona shaped by buffoonery, slapstick, despondency, and irony: in short, a persona identified with that fetish of modernist art, the clown.

The Poet As Map-Maker: The Cartographic Inspiration and Influence of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Map”

2001 ◽  
pp. 37-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adele J. Haft
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Coastal Waters ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
The Third ◽  
The North ◽  
Childhood Home ◽  
New Year’S Eve ◽  
Cold Spring ◽  
American Poets

New Year’s Eve of 1934 found Elizabeth Bishop recuperating from the flu. Out of her isolation, the recently orphaned 23-year-old created “The Map.” Inspired by a map’s depiction of the North Atlantic, Bishop’s exquisite poem alludes in part to the “seashore towns” and coastal waters of her childhood home, Nova Scotia. A seminal twentieth-century poem about maps, Bishop’s “The Map” has inspired a host of other mappoems since it opened her Pulitzer prize-winning collection, Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring, in 1955. My paper, the third in a series advocating the use of poetry in the teaching of geography, will attempt to elucidate Bishop’s masterpiece and introduce the map that, I believe, inspired her poem. The paper also will present two works influenced by “The Map”: Howard Nemerov’s “The Map-Maker on His Art” (1957) and Mark Strand’s “The Map” (1960). Linking these three acclaimed American poets even further is their recognition of an intimate and explicit connection between poets and cartographers.

Indonesian Literature’s Position in World Literature

TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dina Amelia
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Western World ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice

There are two most inevitable issues on national literature, in this case Indonesian literature. First is the translation and the second is the standard of world literature. Can one speak for the other as a representative? Why is this representation matter? Does translation embody the voice of the represented? Without translation Indonesian literature cannot gain its recognition in world literature, yet, translation conveys the voice of other. In the case of production, publication, or distribution of Indonesian Literature to the world, translation works can be very beneficial. The position of Indonesian literature is as a part of world literature. The concept that the Western world should be the one who represent the subaltern can be overcome as long as the subaltern performs as the active speaker. If the subaltern remains silent then it means it allows the “representation” by the Western.

Experiment role in the world music (based on the «The Road» album of the Ukrainian «Dakha Brakha» band)

2018 ◽  
pp. 215-227
Author(s):  
Iia Fedorova
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
World Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
The Road ◽  
Music Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Musical Practices

The main objective of this study is the substantiation of experiment as one of the key features of the world music in Ukraine. Based on the creative works of the brightest world music representatives in Ukraine, «Dakha Brakha» band, the experiment is regarded as a kind of creative setting. Methodology and scientific approaches. The methodology was based on the music practice theory by T. Cherednychenko. The author distinguishes four binary oppositions, which can describe the musical practice. According to one of these oppositions («observance of the canon or violation of the canon»), the musical practices, to which the Ukrainian musicology usually classifies the world music («folk music» and «minstrel music»), are compared with the creative work of «Dakha Brakha» band. Study findings. A lack of the setting to experiment in the musical practices of the «folk music» and «minstrel music» separates the world music musical practice from them. Therefore, the world music is a separate type of musical practice in which the experiment is crucial. The study analyzed several scientific articles of Ukrainian musicologists on the world music; examined the history of the Ukrainian «Dakha Brakha» band; presented a list of the folk songs used in the fifth album «The Road» by «Dakha Brakha» band; and showed the degree of the source transformation by musicians based on the example of the «Monk» song. The study findings can be used to form a comprehensive understanding of the world music musical practice. The further studies may be related to clarification of the other parameters of the world music musical practice, and to determination of the experiment role in creative works of the other world music representatives, both Ukrainian and foreign. The practical study value is the ability to use its key provisions in the course of modern music in higher artistic schools of Ukraine. Originality / value. So far, the Ukrainian musicology did not consider the experiment role as the key one in the world music.

Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Shaobo Xie
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The World

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.

Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Individuation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Hengehold
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Other ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World

Most studies of Simone de Beauvoir situate her with respect to Hegel and the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology begun by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This book analyzes The Second Sex in light of the concepts of becoming, problematization, and the Other found in Gilles Deleuze. Reading Beauvoir through a Deleuzian lens allows more emphasis to be placed on Beauvoir's early interest in Bergson and Leibniz, and on the individuation of consciousness, a puzzle of continuing interest to both phenomenologists and Deleuzians. By engaging with the philosophical issues in her novels and student diaries, this book rethinks Beauvoir’s focus on recognition in The Second Sex in terms of women’s struggle to individuate themselves despite sexist forms of representation. It shows how specific forms of women’s “lived experience” can be understood as the result of habits conforming to and resisting this sexist “sense.” Later feminists put forward important criticisms regarding Beauvoir’s claims not to be a philosopher, as well as the value of sexual difference and the supposedly Eurocentric universalism of her thought. Deleuzians, on the other hand, might well object to her ideas about recognition. This book attempts to address those criticisms, while challenging the historicist assumptions behind many efforts to establish Beauvoir’s significance as a philosopher and feminist thinker. As a result, readers can establish a productive relationship between Beauvoir’s “problems” and those of women around the world who read her work under very different circumstances.

Modernism, Empiricism, and Rationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Dimensional Spectrum ◽  
Culture History ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rule Out

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.

The World after the End of the World

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kas Saghafi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
End Of The World

In several late texts, Derrida meditated on Paul Celan's poem ‘Grosse, Glühende Wölbung’, in which the departure of the world is announced. Delving into the ‘origin’ and ‘history’ of the ‘conception’ of the world, this paper suggests that, for Derrida, the end of the world is determined by and from death—the death of the other. The death of the other marks, each and every time, the absolute end of the world.

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