Betsy Erkkila

Breaking bounds : Whitman and American cultural studies

BLExplores Whitmans homosexuality in relation to his poetry, politics, and life BLIncludes work by Eve Sedgewick, Michael Moon, and Jonathan Arac These new essays reject the persistent tendency in Whitman studies to isolate his sexuality from his politics, and his poetry from both. The issue of his sexuality is instead brought into contact with a wide range of issues, from nationalism to race and gender, pointing to the interdisciplinary future of American literary and cultural study, and the growing influence of gay and lesbian studies.

Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth

As the first full treatment of Walt Whitmans French sources and his later impact on French writers, this book revises our image of the poet and challenges many critical assumptions.Originally published in 1980.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Ethnicity, Literary Theory, and the Grounds of Resistance

THIS ESSAY SEEKS TO ADDRESS SEVERAL QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE current direction, theory, and practice of American literature and studies in the United States. My large question has to do with the relation between minority discourses and poststructuralist theory in the study of American literature and culture. I would like to pose the questions of the subject, authorship, experience, and representation as they have been posed by poststructuralist theory and as they might be said to relate to the study of ethnic, gay, and womens literature in the United States. I would also like to consider the question of the historicity of European, and specifically French poststructuralist, theory.

Does the Republic of Letters Have a Body

At its most radical the American Revolution empowered everybody. ‘‘[L]et the crown . . . be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is,’’ Tom Paine asserted in Common Sense (). In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the name of the American people: ‘‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’’ It is no coincidence that when Abigail Adams translated the Revolutionary language of rights, liberty, consent, and representation into a plea for the rights of women in marriage, family, and state, John Adams associated her request with the uprising of other bodies—‘‘Children,’’ ‘‘Apprentices,’’ ‘‘Negroes,’’ ‘‘Indians’’—who were implicitly excluded from the abstract, disembodied, and universal language of personhood and rights that grounds the originary charter of the American republic. ‘‘As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh,’’ John wrote in response to Adams’s threat ‘‘to foment a Rebelion’’ among women. ‘‘We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to the Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.’’ Recognizing the dangerous loosening of traditional bonds of rank and subordination brought by the revolutionary moment, John reasserts

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

The German director Hans-Jurgen Syberberg does not intend his seven-hour film cycle, Hitler, A Film From Germany (1977), to be shown in what he calls the “cinema around the corner.” Rather, he chooses to travel personally with his film to cultural houses around the world, where the film, which was voted the Best Film of 1977 by the British Film Institute, has amassed a small, elite, but decidedly dedicated following.

Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America

Rejecting the view that interprets Emily Dickinson exclusively as a proto-modernist poet, Joanne Dobson finds Dickinson rooted in the expressive assumptions of her contemporary women writers. By looking at Dickinson in the context of these writers, Dobson uncovers the effects of common grounding in a cultural ethos of femininity that mandated personal reticence. Combining literary history and contemporary feminist literary theory, this study posits a complex interaction of personal preferences and editorial policies that resulted in a community of expression with impact on womens writing and literary careers.