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Primarily through an investigation of his iconic story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” and against a pervasive critical tendency to identify Delmore Schwartz with recognizably “Jewish” sociocultural narratives, this article argues that Schwartz finds experience alienating precisely in the expectation that it recover a legible reality. Indeed, the critical reduction of Schwartz to various formulaic accounts of Jewish assimilation, artistic genius, and modern estrangement ends up illuminating the very way in which Schwartz in fact resists these clichés. The paper relies on the idea of overdetermination as delineated by Freud and Althusser to outline Schwartz's insistence that the ideal imaginative investments made in experience—investments that are presumed to render reality emotionally and ethically useful—on the contrary put reality at an irretrievable remove. Understanding how Schwartz's engagement with modern experience is ultimately more intractable than the extant critical commonplaces about him allow provides an opportunity to move beyond ethnic and racial essentialism in the study of literature.

(1913–68), poet and short‐story writer, born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn. He achieved early recognition with

A short story is presented.

Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay.

Why did Delmore Schwartz linger in cultural memory, even as his poetry was more and more overlooked? This essay argues that it is Schwartz's Jewishness that marked him a celebrity of his literary generation, and that his poetry had little, if anything, to do with it. Rather, Schwartz's cultural identity branded him. Schwartz's vast influence among his peers arises from his unique social position: the poet at midcentury nurtured on the values of New Criticism in conflict with the emerging tastes of postwar audiences; in addition: the Jewish American, largely second-generation, determined to embrace a national identity and detach himself from religion and ethnic practices and affiliations of earlier generations. The uncertainties, ambiguities and disorienting evolutions in each of these subject positions leave both poets and Jews searching for a comfortable perch. The impact of these changes on Schwartz, who was both, would have devastating effects; and it is in the shadow of that devastation that we find his lasting cultural legacy. In order to understand Schwartz's continuing resonance, then, we have to examine how two identities—poet and Jew—collide and concatenate in the culture of the fifties, and become paradigmatic of the irreconcilable forces that lie at the center of the American artist's experience at midcentury.

Phillips examines In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, a poetry by Delmore Schwartz. Delmore Schwartz was a Freudian and a Marxist whose brilliant academic career began with skipping high school graduation for early enrollment at Harvard. In Dreams, Schwartz believed that the movies in our minds demand we acknowledge every image, construct a narrative, and accept the anguish of understanding. It was inspired by the \"dream\" of life, when Schwartz was at the fresh zenith of his intellect and powers as a writer.

How W. H. Auden's emigration to the United States changed the course of postwar American poetry W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. The Age of Auden takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry. For Auden, facing private crisis and global catastrophe, moving to the United States became, in the famous words of his first American poem, a new \"way of happening.\" But his redefinition of his work had a significance that was felt far beyond the pages of his own books. Aidan Wasley shows how Auden's signal role in the work and lives of an entire younger generation of American poets challenges conventional literary histories that place Auden outside the American poetic tradition. In making his case, Wasley pays special attention to three of Auden's most distinguished American inheritors, presenting major new readings of James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. The result is a persuasive and compelling demonstration of a novel claim: In order to understand modern American poetry, we need to understand Auden's central place within it.

The Body , though utterly preposterous, is written with Kureishi's usual brevity and cool precision. It is also philosophically interesting. The old Cartesian idea of a separation between mind and body is now absolutely discredited. But we remain intensely aware of our own duality, if only metaphorically. The soul may not, as Andrew Marvell wrote, be 'fettered in feet' and 'manacled in hands', but Kureishi's [Adam], and no doubt many like him, such as those in America experimenting with cryogenics, clearly believe that the key to personal identity resides not in their physical bodies, but in a certain continuity of consciousness through time. In the best story here, 'The Real Father', a film editor takes his young son on a trip to the English seaside. The man, Mal, and the boy scarcely know each other. They have certainly never lived together - the boy was the result of a brief, casual relationship many years before. Mal tries forlornly to buy his son's affection. They take a room together in a boarding house and, once his son is asleep, Mal wanders down to a beachside bar where he meets some youths gathered around a boom-box. They offer him some whisky and urge him to dance. It is years since he has danced, and even then he did not dance so much as 'pogo'. Yet as he is drawn towards the music, Mal finds himself beginning to hop and then to pogo, 'alone of course, jumping up towards the sky'. The next morning, he discovers that things are a little easier with his son, as if that moment of heightened self-abandon the previous night has awakened something in him, a subdued sense of fellow feeling and inchoate love for the boy.

Augie March opens in 1920s Chicago during the Great Depression. Augie is \"the by-blow of a travelling man\". His adventures, loosely patterned after Bellow's experience, are picaresque, tracing \"a widening spiral that begins in the parish, ghetto, slum and spreads into the greater world\", much as Bellow's own life did. Brilliant set pieces narrate the footloose Augie's upward drift. He becomes a butler, a shoe salesman, a dog-groomer and a book thief.