H. D. and Time

From the introduction to the volume: Cheryl Walker presents the work of poet H.D. as a paradigm for the changed relationship to history women have undergone during the modern period: H.D.\u27s early period is characterized by an avoidance of chronological time..

Antimodern, Modern, and Postmodern Millay: Contexts of Revaluation

In this chapter, Walker examines questions concerning renewed scholarly interest in Edna St. Vincent Millay toward the end of the twentieth century. Specifically, these questions center on whether to rethink the principles of establishing the canon of American literature--indeed, whether the poet changes literary fashions or literary fashions change the poet. Walker\u27s answer is the latter, and her essay examines how Millay is different received through three different periods: antimodern, modern, and postmodern. She argues that whether a poet becomes central to literary study has less to do with the quality of the poetry than with complex cultural factors that allow us to situate poems in familiar and resonate contexts

Sex, Drugs, and Mingling Spirits: Teaching Nineteenth-Century Women Poets

Book abstract: Twentieth-century modernism reduced the list of nineteenth-century American poets to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and (less often) Edgar Allan Poe. The rest were virtually forgotten. This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching marks a milestone in the resurgence of the study of the rest. It features poets, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who were famous in their day, as well as poets who were marginalized on the basis of their race (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alexander Posey) or their sociopolitical agenda (Emma Lazarus, John Greenleaf Whittier). It also takes a fresh look at poets whose work has been dismissed as sentimental (Frances Osgood), genteel (Oliver Wendell Holmes), or didactic (William Cullen Bryant). The volume’s twenty-two essays are grouped into parts: “Teaching Various Kinds of Poems,” “Teaching Poets in Context,” and “Strategies for Teaching.” The fourth part is a selective guide to the field: an annotated bibliography of editions, anthologies, reference books, biographies, critical studies, and Web resources

Sacroiliac Joint: An Overview

Low back pain is a common cause of limitation in daily activities. Sacroiliac joint (SIJ) dysfunction is often an overlooked cause of low back pain. The biomechanics of the SIJ is not well understood. There is controversy about how much movement is in the joint, but it is generally agreed that movement does occur. There are six ligaments in the SIJ that add to its stability and no muscles that act directly on the joint. SIJ dysfunction can be caused by direct trauma, indirect trauma, pregnancy, or muscle imbalances. Evaluation of the SIJ should include subjective and objective information. The objective evaluation consists of two types of special tests; palpation and provocation. Palpation tests have poor intertester reliability while provocation tests have good intertester reliability. Physical therapists should use a combination of tests to increase reliability. Treatment includes rest, medications, modalities, stretching and strengthening, mobilizations, muscle energy techniques (METs), and manipulations. Mobilizations and METs are usually combined to increase the success of treatment. Manipulation is the most successful treatment but it requires special skill and can aggravate low back pain

The Female Body as Icon: Edna Millay Wears a Plaid Dress

The female body has never been so prominently displayed or so critically examined as it is today under the dominance of late capitalism. The results of this display, we can now see, have been mostly negative: women regard themselves at best self-consciously, at worst with disgust. Given this emphasis on self-scrutiny, it comes as no surprise that middle-aged women experience a reduction of self-confidence regarding their physical presences and a concomitant increase in self-dissatisfaction. It is also worth noting that a querulous tone often afflicts them as they grow older, suggesting that they are at odds not only with others but with themselves. These reflections are useful in considering the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, especially with regard to the relatively new set of emphases that appear in Millay\u27s 1939 volume Huntsman, What Quarry? published when the poet was forty-seven

Richard Brautigan: Youth Fishing in America

Richard Brautigan is an epiphenomenon in American literature. He seems to represent some sort of insubstantial alternative. While the academy of letters reads Beckett, Borges, and Nabokov, the kids read Brautigan...His appeal consists primarily in an irrepressible optimism (probably the brand of a woodsy Pacific Northwest background), a style flashing with artifice, and a total disregard for effete university culture. Mr. Brautigan is not himself the product of American higher education or of much formal training of any kind. Furthermore, his fund of simplicity and optimism is a relief for some from the profound despair of writers like Beckett. To complete the picture, I need only add that his flashy technique, in reality concealing a great deal of carelessness, on first reading must strike some readers as more exciting than the whittled style and carefully constructed works of Borges

Teaching Dickinson as a Gen(i)us: Emily Among the Women

In this article, Walker argues that those who teach the poetry of Emily Dickinson should not only compare her to other recognized and lauded American poets, such as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. This method offers no cultural context to provide ligature. It views high art as to be only about language and, on the score of tropological discourse, any two poets could be connected, even across vast expanses of time and distance. While it\u27s useful for students to see how elements of her work connect her not only to some of these great American authors, it\u27s also useful to compare her work to that of other American women poets in her time

Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author

In the course of this essay I wish to reopen the (never fully closed) question of whether it is advisable to speak of the author, or of what Foucault calls the author function, when querying a text, and I wish to reopen it precisely at the site where feminist criticism and post-structuralism are presently engaged in dialogue. Here in particular we might expect that reasons for rejecting author erasure would appear. However, theoretically informed feminist critics have recently found themselves tempted to agree with Barthes, Foucault, and the Edward Said of Beginnings that the authorial presence is best set aside in order to liberate the text for multiple uses. I wish to examine the ways in which feminist critics have moved away from what some would call the old-fashioned assumption that what we do when we read is try to decipher the intentions of the text in terms of what we assume to be the author\u27s deepest self. I also wish to make a further argument for reanimating the author, preserving author-function not only in terms of reception theory, as Foucault would seem at one point to advocate, but also in terms of a politics of author recognition

A Feminist Critic Responds to Recurring Student Questions About Dickinson

Book abstract: The life and the range of topics and tones of Emily Dickinson suit her to be included in such courses as American literature, Romanticism, realism, nineteenth-century culture, and women’s literary traditions. Her poetry poses numerous challenges for readers because of its compressed style, indeterminacy, and constant surprises; her biography fascinates students and critics alike. This volume emphasizes instruction of Dickinson’s poetry at the undergraduate level. Like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, it is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” discusses editions of Dickinson’s poetry, aids to teaching, reference works, biographies, critical studies, and background materials. In the second part, “Approaches,” twenty essays suggest ways to introduce Dickinson and her poetry, draw attention to different aspects of her art, and place the poems in larger contexts. Among the topics raised are love, epistemology, the treatment of death, and implications of gender. Among the courses described are a composition class and an advanced literature class. An appendix provides sample assignments

Persona Criticism and the Death of the Author

The difficulty with doing biographical criticism today is that the figure of the author has increasingly come under attack, almost as if the author\u27s portrait, which at one time routinely accompanied critical works, were being atomized, dissolved in an acid bath of scorn and distrust. Though death of the author critics have made a number of important points about the rigidity and naiveté of certain earlier forms of biographical criticism, I find that in my own practice I am loath to give up all vestiges of the author. The strategy I have chosen is what I would call persona criticism, a form of analysis that focuses on patterns of ideation, voice, and sensibility linked together by a connection to the author. Yet persona criticism allows one to speak of authorship as multiple, involving culture, psyche, and intertextuality, as well as biographical data about the writer