Three Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens

-- Hoshang Merchant

In Western Philosophy, Hegel introduced the tripartite reasoning with a thesis, an anti-thesis, culminating in a synthesis. Buddhism too used such a tripartite mode to perceive the truth about reality, i.e., Is the World Real or is the Mind Real? This problem concerns Wallace Stevens. I use the early, middle, and late period poems of Stevens to show that the only reality is the Poem's, and it is in the Mind.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

The Eco-Ethical Paradigm in Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden

-- Shimimoni Doley

Nineteenth century was a period of nation-building for the Americans. Thus, most of the nineteenth century American literature was preoccupied with the meaning of America, the destiny of America, and the promise of America. But as industrialism gathered speed, it squeezed out the consciousness of all, and the new society's dynamism filled many with dread. Amidst this society in a flux, emerged an American sage and seer Ralph Waldo Emerson. He spoke to a nineteenth century that was ready for an emphasis on individualism and responsive to a new optimism that linked God, Nature, and Man into a magnificent cosmos. Emerson's Nature (1836) was the first definitive statement of his philosophical perspective. The ideas which Emerson endorsed in Nature found explicit moral and practical application in Thoreau, which he records in Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854). This paper examines Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden which present two vital visions concerning Nature: first, the spiritual vision of envisioning the earth as a sacred being and the belief that a Nature-centered consciousness should take hold upon the earth; and second, the environmental vision of living in balance or harmony with nature, i.e., truly adapting to the needs of nature. In modern parlance, it means adopting a `bioregionalist' attitude, i.e., living within the bounty provided by a place and not altering a place to suit our tastes.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Remapping Boundaries: A Study of Paula Gunn Allen's Ecophilosophy

-- Tessy Anthony C

Paula Gunn Allen, a bicultural Laguna Native American writer and brought up in the white mainstream patriarchy, makes known to the world her ecophilosophy through her works. She creates, in her works, an awareness about the rich Laguna culture that foregrounds Mother Earth in all her vitality and vigor. Allen's Native Indian mother and grandmother instilled in her Indian traditions and cultural values which are deep-rooted in her. She found the push and pull of the two cultures that upheld two different value systems tearing her apart. Logical reasoning makes her fall on the right side of the fence and show her loyalty to her tribe. She reorders and renegotiates a new relationship of man with land and environment from a gendered and geopolitical view. She, as an enlightened reformist, remaps the boundaries for altering the mainstream's perspective. This paper presents Allen as an enlightened posthumanist.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Lexical and Semantic Deviations in e e cummings with Reference to Some Select Poems

-- Samina Azhar

This paper aims to explore the uncertainties of English language in general and the lexical and semantic deviations in e e cummings in particular, with reference to ten of his poems, namely, "the hours rise up putting off stars," "in just-spring when the world," "nobody loses all the time," "it is so long since my heart," "as freedom is a breakfastfood," "love is the every only god," "somewhere i have never travelled gladly beyond," "sweet spring is your," "if i have made, my lady, intricate," and "anyone lived in a pretty how town." These poems have been studied with the aim to examine how language can break the linguistic norms and yet be communicative and effective. The paper shows how cummings goes beyond the constraints of the linguistic forms with all their conventions and insipid attitudes and carves out a fresh language for all his poetic requirements.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

American Travel Narratives and the `Problem' of History: Diane Glancy, Compulsory Postcoloniality and Sacajawea

-- Pramod K Nayar

The form of postcolonial writing in Diane Glancy, this paper proposes, works to appropriate and fit the text into `compulsory postcoloniality' where the postcolonial author discussing cultural encounters uses authenticating devices and prepares a `narrative society' that demands such `authentic' writing about the postcolonial condition and its revisionism of its past. Sacajawea's narrative functions as a `narrative parasite' because it formally disrupts and interrupts mainstream (white) information and induces a different order, asserting agency. The interaction of her narrative with the white men's produces a `noise,' but one which is agential in determining the shape of the overall narrative of the expedition. Sacajawea's narrative rewrites the history of white exploration itself by showing the native's individual as well as racial identity and mobility, without which the whites' exploration would have been impossible. The novel works as a tale of postcolonial agency because it takes the central trope of Anglo-European travelmobilityas a feature of the native woman. It generates a narrative where we are perforce asked to acknowledge that one of the greatest exploratory expeditions was facilitated by a native woman's role as well. All the authenticating devices that point to `true' native/postcolonial identity are present in Glancy's writing. The paper proposes that we can discern a society that has learnt to disbelieve the story of `heroic' expeditions such as Lewis and Clark's and looks forward to texts like Glancy's that show another narrative as well.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

`Creative Midrash Forces the Students to Read, So They Realize They Aren't the First to Feel, Think, or Write Anything Down': Biblical Archetypes in Allegra Goodman's The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls

-- Gustavo Sánchez Canales

Taking as points of departure Carol Meyers' concepts of (male) `authority' and (female) `power' as explained in Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (1988), this paper explores the presence of biblical archetypes in Allegra Goodman's The Family Markowitz (1996) and Kaaterskill Falls (1998), focusing on the significance and meaning, for these two novels, of the biblical names of four female characters (Miriam, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Rachel) and three male characters (Isaac, Isaiah, and Elijah).

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Tracing the New Historical Tenets in Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination: A Critical Assessment

-- Rajani Sharma

New Historicism is the most innovative and popular critical movement that came into existence in the 1980s. The credit for the emergence of this new critical manifesto goes to Stephen Greenblatt who initiated a reactionary canon in the sphere of literary theory to the prevailing text-oriented critical approaches pursued by New Critics, deconstructionists, structuralists, and poststructuralists. New Historicists, like these rigid followers of linguistic approaches, undoubtedly acknowledge the importance of literary text, however, they also analyze it with an insight into its historicity, as a literary text does not exist in a cultural vacuum. The phrase coined by Louis Montrose, `historicity of the text and textuality of history,' is the critical premise of New Historicists. The present paper aims at analyzing the new historical insights in Lionel Trilling's famous critical treatise The Liberal Imagination. An attempt has been made here to analyze how Lionel Trilling stresses the direct and reciprocal relationship between literature and culture and how he defends the true liberal flexibility and openness of mind for dealing with literary works. This analysis reveals the fundamental similarities and dissimilarities between Lionel Trilling's critical canon and that of New Historicists, with a hypothetical feasibility of Lionel Trilling's contribution to New Historicism. This is the focal issue scrutinized here, as New Historicists too, like Lionel Trilling, think that for a literary critic, `an honest place [is] in between.'

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