South Atlantic Modern Language Association Awards – serie

Reading Race examines the work of twentieth-century white American poets from Carl Sandburg to Adrienne Rich, from Ezra Pound to Allen Ginsberg, revealing within their poetry and casual writings a body of literature that transmits racism, even as it sometimes speaks against it.Tracing the persistence of racial discourse, Aldon Nielsen argues that white Americans, throughout their history, have used a language of their own primacy, a language that treats blacks as an abstract other—an aggregate nonwhite—to be acted upon and determined by whites. White discourse drapes over blacks an intricate veil of images and understandings—assertions of inferiority; metaphors of exoticism; similes of animals; tropes of fertility, nothingness, and death—through which whites read race and beneath which blacks remain imprisoned."Words," Nielsen writes, "create and maintain relationships of power as surely as do prisons and arms." Speaking of the discourse of race in America, Nielsen identifies "dead metaphors"—words, images, ideas—that operate in much the same way as the "charged detail" of Pound or the "objective correlative" of T.S. Eliot. Embedded in the language, they are instantly recognizable to the native speaker. Poets, when they draw upon these metaphors, demand racist thinking in order to be understood.

The works of the German Romantic authors Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) and Friedrich Hölderlin were profoundly affected by their loss of belief in endings and ultimacies. They wrote during an age of intellectual crisis, when apocalyptic expectations had reached their pitch and the volatile ideas generated by the French Revolution seemed to challenge even the passing of time itself.In Delayed Endings, Alice A. Kuzniar demonstrates how Novalis and Hölderlin exemplified the Romantics' new way of narrating time, and how their method of nonclosure, or the deliberate avoidance of resolution and the strategies that bring it about, united the narrative, semantic, and thematic strains of their work. Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen not only lacks a conclusion but even has a ruptured and disoriented beginning. Sharing Novalis's obsession with deferred endings, Hölderlin's late verse fragments and revisions reflect his questioning of ultimate human endings. Just as the persona in his hymn "Patmos" is within close proximity of friends but forever separated from them by treacherous alpine gorges, so too is God near yet incomprehensible.Novalis and Hölderlin represent a generation of writers who no longer perceived themselves as participants in a world of meaningful temporal progression. Introducing Novalis and Hölderlin as masters in the art of sustained deviation and displacement, Alice Kuzniar demonstrates how Romantic writers foreshadowed modern critical thought in their mistrust of completed artifice and their circumvention of the reader's desire for closure.