T. S. Eliot and Transpacific modernism

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in American Literary History following peer review. The version of record: "Patterson, Anita. "T. S. Eliot and Transpacific Modernism." American Literary History, vol. 27 no. 4, 2015, pp. 665-682." is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajv042.Japonisme is a term often used to describe the shaping effects of Japanese culture and aesthetics on European art, but by the 1880s a similar trend emerged in the US, influencing popular culture as well as fine arts and poetry. This essay examines how Japonisme figured T. S. Eliot's development as a poet, focusing on Boston as a world city that was rapidly becoming global. It shows how Kakuzo Okakura, an art historian and curator of Asian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts during the time when Eliot was a Harvard undergraduate, and Masaharu Anesaki, a pioneer in the study of comparative religion who lectured on Mahayana Buddhism there when Eliot was a graduate student, inspired transpacific intercultural dialogue that would last the poet a lifetime. Eliot's formative encounter with Okakura and Anesaki raised his awareness of his family history in a region with longstanding ties to Asia; it nurtured his ambivalent engagement with such Boston-area writers as Emerson, whose prior interest in Confucianism laid a foundation for Eliot's modernism; and the encounter taught Eliot valuable lessons about moral action and impersonality, culminating in poems such as Four Quartets

This music crept by me upon the waters” : The Musical Quality of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk

Приглашение к танцу: интермедиальные аллюзии в ранней поэзии Т. С. Элиота

В статье рассматриваются связи между танцем, изобразительным искусством и модернистской поэзией, послужившие основой поэтического эксперимен­та

Galaxy Morphology from NICMOS Parallel Imaging

We present high resolution NICMOS images of random fields obtained in parallel to other HST observations. We present galaxy number counts reaching H=24. The H-band galaxy counts show good agreement with the deepest I- and K-band counts obtained from ground-based data. We present the distribution of galaxies with morphological type to H<23. We find relatively fewer irregular galaxies compared to an I-band sample from the Hubble Deep Field, which we attribute to their blue color, rather than to morphological K-corrections. We conclude that the irregulars are intrinsically faint blue galaxies at z<1.Comment: 13 pages, including 4 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”: Past, Present, and Future

Critical interpretations of “Burnt Norton” have varied widely over the nearly 80 years since its first publication. While many early scholars saw it as an abstract meditation on philosophy, the revelation in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s of the relationship of Eliot and Emily Hale changed to some extent the way in which it is read, with more of a personal view, at least in its inspiration. Indeed, I suggest that “Burnt Norton” and specifically the rose garden passage presents the two figures in the poem at a moment fraught with the possibility of rekindling their earlier romance. Our knowledge of the subsequent poems and of the failure of the further development of their relationship greatly colors our reading of the poem, preventing us from seeing the tension and suspense of this experience as it balances between the attraction of human love and that of a demanding spiritual commitment

The Hubble Deep Field in the Far Ultraviolet

Results from a recent HST survey of field galaxies at wavelengths 1600 Angstroms and 2400 Angstroms are be presented. The data are used to constrain the fraction of Lyman-continuum radiation that escapes from galaxies at redshifts z ~ 1. The combined UV-IR photometry for HDF galaxies is also used to investigate whether low-mass starburst galaxies dominate the field-galaxy population at redshift z ~1. The relative lack of objects with the colors of faded bursts suggests that star-formation is largly quiescent rather than bursty or episodic.Comment: Presented at the ESO/ECF/STScI Workshop on Deep Fields, October 2000. 7 pages, 3 figure

Educational potential, underachievement, and cultural pluralism

The term 'underachievement' is widespread in modern educational discourse, invoked most frequently in relation to a perceived failure to reach 'potential'. In this paper, it is suggested that such terms, though widely used, are highly problematic, masking ideological assumptions which concern socially constructed, culturally sensitive, subjective, and relative matters. In fact, underachievement is most often used to mean low academic attainment and the paper argues that this is already better understood in terms of well-known factors such as prior attainment, socioeconomic disadvantage, and systemic biases. This paper also suggests that there is a danger of pathologising the low attainer when in fact it may be the system which is failing the learner. Further, the paper argues that the monologic focus on individual academic attainment as the sole measure of 'achievement' fails to take account of alternative cultural values and risks the charge of cultural imperialism

Il poeta e i suoi fantasmi: W. H. Auden in Four Quartets

Il saggio mostra la presenza di un palinsesto audeniano nei Four Quartets di T.S. Eliot facendo riferimento a uno specifico passo di Little Gidding e alla poesia “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”. La contiguità temporale che rende plausibile il rapporto tra i due testi - scritti rispettivamente nel 1941-42 e nel Febbraio del 1939, a seguito delatore di Yeats in Gennaio del 1939 - si associa al comune oggetto tematico: il recentemente scomparso Yeats. Il poeta irlandese offre lo spunto per una riflessione sulla poesia e sulla funzione dell'arte e dell'intellettuale, condotta attraverso l'opposizione tra thought and theory da un lato e il gift poetico dall'altro. Yeats è infatti il dead master, il “compound ghost” con cui tanto Eliot quanto Auden articolano i problemi del rapporto ideologia-poesia; è la figura che consente, seppure elusivamente, di precisare i contorni ideologici eliotiani rispetto ai quali la poesia si offre come riscatto.The essay argues for the presence of an Audenean palimpsest in Eliot’s Four Quartets, by referring to a specific passage in “Little Gidding” and to the poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”. The temporal proximity suggesting the connection between the two texts – written, respectively, in 1941-42 and in February 1939, following Yeates’ death in January of that year – is substantiated by their common thematic object: the recently departed Yeats. The Irish poet, now among the dead, provides the occasion for a critical reflection on poetry as well as on artistic and intellectual practice. Transitively referred to Yeats, both Auden’s and Eliot’s concerns center around the opposition between thought and theory, on the one hand, and the poetic “gift”, on the other; between the limitations and distortions of politico-ideological militancy and the exercise of a poetry as a way to redeem them. Yeats is thus the “dead master” in whom both Eliot and Auden can see mirrored their own intellectual trajectory, detecting in the purgatorial words of the “compound ghost”, no matter how elusive, traces of moral-religious and aesthetic, but also ideological and political meanings, otherwise undetectable

“Safe from destruction by fire”: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Venetian Manuscripts

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston houses over thirty Venetian manuscripts dating from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. They comprise official documents issued by the Doges; histories of the Republic of Venice, its government, and the patriciate; diplomas; and a statute book of a lay confraternity. Most volumes contain complete and dated texts, are illuminated, and survive in their original bindings. The collection, therefore, charts the evolution over three centuries of Venetian book production, and provides a wealth of sources for the study of Venetian history, portraiture, iconography, genealogy, and heraldry. Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) purchased many of her Venetian manuscripts en bloc in 1903 from the Harvard University professor Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1907). Norton placed his collection formed in Venice in Gardner’s newly-opened museum to safeguard it from dispersal and mutilation for its miniatures and bindings. Drawing on Gardner and Norton’s unpublished correspondence and acquisition documents in the archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Harvard University, this article reconstructs the formation of one of the most important collections of Venetian manuscripts outside of Venice and presents a hitherto unknown episode of the preservation of illuminated manuscripts by two prominent Gilded Age American collectors

Advancement, Fall 2005

Advancement, a supplement to Bostonia magazine, provided updates on BU development activities, including major gifts and projects