2017 Literature Publications and Grants
Cole, Henri. “Afterward: My John Berryman; or, Imagination, Love, Intellect, and Pain.” John Berryman: Centenary Essays, edited by Philip Coleman and Peter Campion. Peter Lang, International Academic Publishers, 2017, pp. 295-298.
Cole, Henri. "Doves." Poem. Artist book accompanying the installation, Tobias Pils, Untitled, edited by Florian Steininger. Kunstalle Krems, 2017.
Cole, Henri. "Dune," "Twilight," "Insomnia," "Snow Moon Flower," "Birthday," and "Haircut." Poems translated into Polish by Jacek Gutorow. Fraza, no. 95-96, 2017
Cole, Henri. "Elevation." Poem. RARITAN, vol. 36, no. 4, 2017, pp. 34
Cole, Henri. "Epivir, d4T, Crixivan." Poem. The Nation, March 6, 2017.
Cole, Henri. “Gay Bingo at a Pasadena Animal Shelter.” Poem. The Nation, October 26, 2017.
Cole, Henri. "Human Highway." Poem. RARITAN, vol. 36, no. 4, 2017, pp. 35.
Cole, Henri. Interview with Howl-Where Readers Go to Read, August 3, 2017.
Cole, Henri. "Kayaking on the Charles." Poem. The Paris Review, issue 223, 2017.
Cole, Henri. "On Pride." Poem. The Paris Review, issue 223, 2017.
Cole, Henri. "Stevens and Frost: 'The Greatest Poverty Is Not to Live in a Physical World.'" Essay. The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 97-99.
Cole, Henri. "Weeping Cherry." Poem. The Nation. April 3, 2017.
Graham, Jorie and Henri Cole. "Renga for Obama." Poem. The Harvard Review. February 18, 2017.
Gutorow, Jacek, and Henri Cole. “Interview: Elegy Became Our Song.” Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 5, 2017, pp. 3-11.
Farrell, John. “Paradoxes of Incarnation: Medieval Allegory Revisited.” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 26, 2017.
Farrell, John. The Varieties of Authorial Intention: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Abstract: This book explores the logic and historical origins of a strange taboo that has haunted literary critics since the 1940s, keeping them from referring to the intentions of authors without apology. The taboo was enforced by a seminal article, “The Intentional Fallacy,” and it deepened during the era of poststructuralist theory. Even now, when the vocabulary of “critique” that has dominated the literary field is under sweeping revision, the matter of authorial intention has yet to be reconsidered. This work explains how “The Intentional Fallacy” confused different kinds of authorial intentions and how literary critics can benefit from a more up-to-date understanding of intentionality in language. The result is a challenging inventory of the resources of literary theory, including implied readers, poetic speakers, omniscient narrators, interpretive communities, linguistic indeterminacy, unconscious meaning, literary value, and the nature of literature itself.
Gaitskill, Mary. Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays. Pantheon, 2017
Abstract: From one of the most singular presences in American fiction comes a searingly intelligent book of essays on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal. Whether she’s writing about date rape or political adultery or writers from John Updike to Gillian Flynn, Mary Gaitskill reads her subjects deftly and aphoristically and moves beyond them to locate the deep currents of longing, ambition, perversity, and loneliness in the American unconscious. She shows us the transcendentalism of the Talking Heads, the melancholy of Björk, the playfulness of artist Laurel Nakadate. She celebrates the clownish grandiosity and the poetry of Norman Mailer’s long career and maps the sociosexual cataclysm embodied by porn star Linda Lovelace. And in the deceptively titled “Lost Cat,” she explores how the most intimate relationships may be warped by power and race. Witty, tender, beautiful, and unsettling, Somebody with a Little Hammer displays the same heat-seeking, revelatory understanding for which we value Gaitskill’s fiction.
Rentz, Ellen K. Review of Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600, by Ryan McDermott. Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 70, issue 2, 2017, pp. 776-78.
Abstract: In this essay, I review a recent book about tropology at work in literature and in the lives of lay people in late medieval and early modern England. Tropology was central to the reading of scripture, but as McDermott argues, it was also a means of literary invention, and one with tremendous staying power: tropological invention "survived" into the Reformation and ought to be seen as "the most important principle of continuity between 'medieval' and Reformation biblical cultures" (4). McDermott brings theological inquiry and biblical exegesis into conversation with late medieval literature in ways that challenge traditional disciplinary divides, demonstrating how a wide range of texts and genres - Patience, Piers Plowman, the York Cycle - function as "powerful theological thought machines" (10). In McDermott's book, tropological invention proves flexible, dynamic, and inclusive.