Burnt and Blossoming: Material Mysticism in Trilogy and Four Quartets

This paper brings two WWII poems into dialogue: H.D.'s Trilogy and Eliot's Four Quartets. Both poems express a creative response to the destruction of war. My reading of Trilogy suggests a material mysticism in which vision and renewal are situated within the natural world, rituals and bodily experience. Bringing this understanding of mysticism to bear on Four Quartets reveals tension between transcendence and materiality. For Eliot, redemption comes through time and location, while for H.D., redemption lies within material particularity. Four Quartets oscillates between an apophatic discourse that seeks to transcend desire and history and an emphasis on material particularities

The Epistolary Politics of Virginia Woolf & Ta-Nehisi Coates

In this essay, Erica Gene Delsandro explores the “layered rhythms” shared by Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015). Both authors, separated by gender, race, and history, employ the epistolary form for political ends, troubling the distinction between private experience and public discourse. Born out of an interdisciplinary positionality, the pairing of Woolf and Coates stands as an example of how feminist reading practices can productively reinvigorate modernist studies particularly and literary studies generally