Transatlantic Topographies

This first chapter explores the geographical and historical sweep of the modernist vertical imagination in both Europe and the Americas. It begins with comparisons between Franz Kafka’s imagined Amerika and Max Weber’s writings on the “spirit of capitalism” after traveling to the United States, as well as W.E.B. Du Bois’ conceptions of racial stratification and uplift after studying in Germany. From here, it considers the rise of American empire and capitalist culture in terms of industrial scale, vertical elevation, and the “technological sublime.” Key examples include Eugene Jolas’ Verticalist movement in relation to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in relation to the rise of New York City; major writings by Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, George Oppen, and Claude McKay; and conceptions of racial stratification, uplift, and solidarity in Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

Between Poetic Voice and Silence: Hart Crane, Yvor Winters, Metapoetics and Emily Dickinson’s Legacy

The article is a comparative study of the ways in which two American modernist poets bound by a literary and human connection, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, dealt with Emily Dickinson’s legacy in their own works. My study is an attempt to place Crane within the legacy of the American Renaissance as represented not by Walt Whitman, with whom he is customarily associated, but by Dickinson, and to examine the special place she holds in Crane’s poetry and in his thinking about poetry and the world at large. Crane’s poetic take on the Amherst poet is set against and complemented by his friend Yvor Winters’s ambiguous relationship with Dickinson’s heritage: troubled by an anxiety of influence, Winters, the poet-critic, vacillates between his reverence for the female poet and his skepticism about certain aspects of her œuvre. In the close readings of the poems in question undertaken in my study, the focus is on their metapoetic dimension. Particular emphasis is laid on the dialectics of silence, which plays a key role in both Crane’s and Winters’s works under discussion, as well as on the related themes of blankness and absence, poetic plenitude and perfection. Attention is also given to the problematics of death, time and timelessness. While Winters concentrates mostly on metapoetics in his exploration of the Dickinsonian tradition, Crane goes further, considering the fate of female artists and gender issues, thereby transcending poetic self-reflexiveness and addressing farther-reaching community concerns, with particular emphasis on anti-patriarchal and feminist ones.

American Failurism: Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Kenneth Burke’s Paradox of Purity

Hart Crane acknowledged the problem of creating a representative tale of the American tribe. Unlike other writers, however, Crane harnessed the long poem’s generic incapacity to universalize experience as his poem’s central structural and thematic principle. This failure of linguistic union is analogous to the failure of sexual union, but these broken erotic unions open space for poetic expressions of an unidealized myth of homosexual union.

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

This book collects the scholarly work that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013. It includes essays that have been previously published in leading journals as well as materials that remained unpublished. Its parts represent the two book projects that See hoped to complete: Queer Natures: Feeling Degenerate in Literary Modernism and Queer Mythologies: Community and Memory in Modern Literature. The first reinterprets the key term nature, central to so many discussions of literature and sexuality. For See, nature is no longer an unchanging substrate or a philosophical given. Relying on a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues instead that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable. Since it makes room for the aesthetic, by way of what Darwin called sexual selection, nature is also affected by feeling. On these grounds, See argues that nature itself might be considered queer. The second project proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities. See looks at the ways in which queer community has been imagined in literary works from a wide range of authors, and he analyzes the role that literature has played in providing significant aesthetic versions of that community. Locating the various failures of these myths is a way, he hopes, of approaching another, more successful communal story. In addition to his reading of Darwin, See provides new interpretations of modern writers including Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Hart Crane, and T. S. Eliot.