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Philip Roth's third novel, Portnoy's Complaint (1969), hit the trifecta: it was scandalous, it was critically acclaimed, and it was a bestseller. These qualities made it a potent weapon for challenging the strict system of censorship then in place in Australia—as Penguin Books Australia realized in 1970, when it decided to publish Portnoy's Complaint, spurring trials that continued for three years. This paper draws on archival sources and interviews to argue that Portnoy's publication in Australia upended the system of uniform censorship, emboldened publishers and activists to further defiance, drew public attention to censorship, and proved critical to the dismantling of the censorship system that followed in 1972-73.

Here's a crowd, there's the bridge, and over there, at the southern tip of Manhattan, black smoke rears high to cloud the sun. James Purdy feels Daniel is the most complete expression of love in all his work: \"It's too late because the loved one's dead, but he realizes what he loved at the threshold of death. When they take his blood pressure, it shoots up. A nurse comes to check his blood pressure.

Richard Rorty speaks of “we ironists” who use irony as the primary tool in their scholarly work and life. We cannot approach irony in terms of truth, simply because, due to its ironies, the context no longer is metaphysical. This is Rorty’s challenge. Rorty’s promise focuses on top English Departments: they are hegemonic, they rule over the humanities, philosophy, and some social sciences using their superior method of ironizing dialectic. I refer to Hegel, Gerald Doherty’s “pornographic” writings, and Gore Vidal’s non-academic critique of academic literary criticism. My conclusion is that extensive use of irony is costly; an ironist must regulate her relevant ideas and speech acts—Hegel makes this clear. Irony is essentially confusing and contestable. Why would we want to use irony in a way that trumps metaphysics? Metaphysics, as defined by Rorty, is a problematic field, but irony can hardly replace it. At the same time, I admit that universal irony is possible, that is, everything can be seen in ironic light, or ironized. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and criticize Rorty’s idea of irony by using his own methodology, that is, ironic redescription. We can see the shallowness of his approach to irony by contextualizing it. This also dictates the style of the essay.

No one had checked anyone for weapons, and we were thousands gathered in an enclosed space.) Many of the speakers throughout the night addressed the chaotic mood of the cultural and political moment; that same day saw massive protests at JFK airport against Executive Order 13769, otherwise known as the Muslim travel ban. In some respects, the expressions of the fantastical and the surreal that were being shaped a little over seventy years ago have now become commonplace, devoured and metabolized by our popular culture. Few people will bat an eye at the soft surrealism of a GEICO ad between YouTube videos, any number of scripted series adopting a panoply of absurdist styles, or the internet, our glorious collective font of anarchic creative energy harnessed (sometimes) in memes, tweets, loosely organized aesthetic movements, unruly eruptions of the weird.

[...]certain Lives of writers (les Vies d'écrivains), with the upper case \" V or \"L\" denoting biography as opposed to just existence, were written posthumously, in a later century and literary era. [...]she identifies three principal phases in the evolution of literary biography during the years in question: lapériode rhétorique, lapériode mondaine, and lapériode historique. While the public may have viewed Moliere as a severe, witty critique of French society, he was, according to the astute observations of Grimarest, a philosopher at heart who could not seek pleasure in contemplating the world because of the turmoil in his private life: a young, unfaithful wife to monitor; a theatrical troupe to manage; and a king to please.

The culture of Italy influenced Twain in a number of ways: first through his satire on art, second on his recognition of the decline of Venice as a global force, third on his reflections on Italian lifestyle as a tranquil unity of nature and civilization, and finally on his acceptance of some of the religious and family values that Italian culture promoted. Tintoretto's Last Supper in the chiesa of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, aside from being a didactic religious portrayal, captures the sense of the worldly domain (resembling a Venetian inn, with servants) watched over by a heavenly realm (a radical use of light, with God's servants, angels, overhead). Twain recognized that daily devotion to one's faith but found organized religion of any kind a hindrance to the human spirit, relying instead on a devotion to his family and to places he called home. Twain wrestled with issues of family structure and individual identity in Pudd'nhead Wilson and Huck Finn, with inherited power in Connecticut Yankee, and perhaps emulated the kind of genteel lifestyle that he saw in Venice by becoming part of the Langdon family in Elmira, which represented the values he would later find in Italy.

This dissertation examines the transatlantic reception and adaptation of the Nouveau Roman in the American literary field, tracing the mechanisms by which its theoretical and aesthetic principles were misunderstood, transformed, and ultimately integrated into American literary culture. It introduces the concept of structural misunderstanding to account for the ways in which literary ideas, when transferred across national and cultural contexts, are necessarily reshaped by the positions available in the receiving field. With an emphasis on the years between 1950 and the end of the 1970s—a period marked by widespread debates about the \"death of the novel\" in the United States—this study explores how American critics, novelists, and publishers engaged with nouveaux romanciers, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor. It argues that figures such as Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal played key roles in framing the movement within the American literary discourse, either championing or resisting its experimental formalism. Through a comparative analysis of Samuel Beckett and Paul Auster, the dissertation further demonstrates how nouveau romanesque techniques were absorbed into the American postmodern detective novel, particularly in relation to self-reflexivity, structural play, and the destabilization of narrative authority. Additionally, this study highlights the role of publishing institutions, particularly Grove Press, in mediating the introduction of the Nouveau Roman to the American readership. It contends that the countercultural climate of the 1960s facilitated the movement's reception, as American intellectuals sought literary models that could offer an alternative to both traditional realism and the emergent mass culture of the paperback boom. By analyzing the intersection of literary theory, publishing practices, and critical discourse, this dissertation provides a new framework for understanding the cross-cultural mobility of avant-garde literary movements and their impact on the evolution of the novel in the United States. At a high level, this project claims that American literature may never have been organically \"postmodern,\" and that it may, instead, have imported and remixed an existing strain of modernism from France in order to reinvigorate its domestic, literary experimentalism.

The Three African Americans in new faculty posts are Kandis Leslie Gilliard-AbdulAziz at the University of California, Riverside, Sonia M. Gipson Rankin at the University of New Mexico School of Law, and Teju Cole, who will teach creative writing at Harvard University.