Relentlist Women:
On the Lists & Catalogs of Natalia Ginzburg & Annie Ernaux
Kyra Lisse
9.2
McClanahan is hardly the first female nonfictionist to revel in the literary list or catalog—forms, writes author Cynthia Gralla, that differ only in that the former is often vertical and the latter, horizontal (“Literary Lists Are Records of Female Desire”). She joins the good company of Natalia Ginzburg and Annie Ernaux, two twentieth-century European writers who grew up during World Wars I and II, respectively. In Ginzburg’s essay “He and I” (1994), the narrator catalogs her relationship with her husband, a man who believes himself to be superior in every way. Ernaux’s memoir The Years (2017), meanwhile, attempts to tell the story of a generation of women, often addressing, through lists, situations of marriage and divorce. Both writers use this literary gear shift to moving effect: they co-opt a traditionally female, domestic form in order to gain control over their relationships—and their cultural moments more broadly—thus creating psychological and aesthetic order and distance. Click here to continue reading.
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The Imagery of Nature in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet
Blossom D'Souza
9.2
Letter writing, once the only mode of communication, is a dying art and offers ample evidence of the transformative power of words. Letters once received were read, saved, and after a stretch of time, retrieved once more perhaps from a box of similar letters, to be perused and read again. A letter may carry love and friendship, yearning, advice or inspiration.
When Franz Xaver Kappus learns that the poet he admires—Rainer Maria Rilke—had studied at the same military academy where he himself had been sent to train for a reluctant career, he writes to the poet to seek understanding and feedback for his own attempts at poetry. The responses that Rilke sends to this first and many other letters comprise the book Letters to a Young Poet, which is a collection of ten letters in lucid, lyrical and enchanting prose. The letters are addressed to Franz Kappus; nonetheless, they seem to speak to each eager reader who discovers them for the first time, as yet ignorant of the treasures this little book holds. Click here to continue reading. |
“Life as a Boneyard”:
Art, History, and Ecology in One Tim Robinson Essay
William Kerwin
9.2
The Irish essayist Tim Robinson’s work is notoriously hard to pin down, as he embodies the interdisciplinary as much as any writer I can imagine. The poet Moya Cannon says that he is “one of the great restorers, or re-storyers, one of the quiet unravellers of imperium” (125). Cannon’s sentence, in the move from “re-storyer” to “imperium,” captures the intertwining of literature and history at the core of Robinson’s work, and his books should find homes on history syllabi and not just in the literature curriculum. And of course the increasingly influential field of ecopoetics, with its attention to the meeting points of the human and the non-human, provides another discipline that can claim Robinson. But again, Robinson’s work sits uneasily in a critical field, as many ecocritics are rejecting the values and goals of “nature writing” and its approaches to the natural world as a repository of the sublime; instead, they offer a vision of ecopoetics as a story of loss and criminality. John-Thomas Tremblay, in a firebrand essay entitled "No More Nature: On Ecopoetics in the Anthropocene," offers a radical distinction between two ways of writing about nature: “Both creative and critical branches of ecopoetics depart from nature writing. Ecopoetics trades an Emersonian or Thoreauvian attention to sublime, untouched nature for sites of extraction, chemical spills, and other manifestations of ecosystemic violence.” Tremblay’s “to the barricades” attitude seems to reject any sense of the beautiful in writings about the natural world, but Robinson’s work only partially goes in this direction. He does reject the concept of pristine or untouched places, forcing a romantically inclined thinker towards disenchantment, but he also has an eye, and an ear, out for the beautiful. Click here to continue reading.
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The Mundane as Maximalism of the Mind: Reclaiming the Quotidian
Jill Kolongowski & Amy Monticello
9.2
We know. We don’t want to write about the pandemic either. But as nonfiction writers, amidst the tragedies and uncountable losses, the pandemic forced us to learn again what it’s so easy to forget: what is worthy of our writing attention. “How was your day?” Within the tedium of this question are the seeds for an essay, a book, or even many essays and books. In this essay, we will explore how studying the so-called mundane, forgettable, daily details of our lives can unfold in unexpected, generative ways. In our to-do lists and sleepless nights, writers at any level can find patterns, obsessions, forgotten histories, buried stories. In the tradition of Sonya Huber and Ross Gay, you do not need the extraordinary to find your subjects—you already have the extraordinary within the ordinary. Click here to continue reading.
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A Land Without Shortcuts: Tim Robinson and Máiréad Robinson
Eamonn Wall
9.2
Though it is tempting to view Tim Robinson as a solitary man moving through the wild Irish countryside, Robinson’s work is both a community effort and a community-building enterprise: he is guided by neighbors, experts from universities, people met along the road, and by many women and men who invite him into their homes who provide rest, tea, and brown bread. He observes as he walks and absorbs as he sits studying or listening—these are his building blocks. An official map brings with it canonical status, a sense of defining the world that it reviews, but it is a mere sketch of a world that is much grander and that can be but inadequately drawn while wielding the map-maker’s limited tools. What’s needed is amplification, an ordered cacophony of voices: the author’s, the expert’s, the resident’s, the cartographer’s, the biologist’s, the lyrics of songs and the stanzas of poems, and the many vital breaths of the nonhuman. Robinson’s work has achieved success and is so moving because it has always been guided by such a spirit of openness to ideas of truth, methods of observation, and points of view. Always, Robinson is human, curious, and persuadable as he reminds us in Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom, “Sometimes in this bicycle-powered world of roadside and hearthside conversations I felt I was inhabiting my own nostalgic fantasy of bygone Ireland.” Patrick Pearse and John Millington Synge, two writers whose work Robinson explores and admires, often sought to invent an Irish West amenable to their own beliefs. Robinson is aware of their mythmaking, of the draw of the past he shares with them, while he is also as an outsider able to reveal to us both the visionary and the deluded. Though erudition and science often do battle with myth and fantasy in the in the Ireland that he describes, Robinson revels in the oral and the non-human; he never loses his “own nostalgic fantasy” because it has always been part of who he is, why he is here, and it is a much-recorded living aspect of rural Irish life in the West. Coming to Árainn as a younger man, newly married to Máiréad, was a romantic journey, one inseparable from the place they settled in, and one that never lost its luster. Click here to continue reading.
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