Meryl Altman | DePauw University (original) (raw)

Papers by Meryl Altman

Routledge eBooks, Jul 10, 2023

Lesbiantiquity, 2024

My translation, with introduction and annotations, of an excerpt from Lucian's Erotes.

U.M.I. (University Microfilms International) Dissertation Information Service eBooks, 1988

William Carlos Williams Review, 2011

Stevens, Williams, Crane and the Motive for Metaphor. Robert Rehder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan... more Stevens, Williams, Crane and the Motive for Metaphor. Robert Rehder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xxv+207 pp. $79.95 (cloth). Robert Rehder, who teaches at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, has written a clear, straightforward, reasonable analysis of what three modern poets said about, and did with, metaphor. Perhaps it was unlucky that I turned to the book right after grading my American lit exams, and found he'd organized his thoughts along similarly prosaic lines: "discuss X (in this case, metaphor) in the work of three poets we've read this term, giving clear examples, and develop an idea of your own." Professor Rehder is perhaps the last man to thank his typists for dealing with illegible handwritten drafts, and this is perhaps the last book that will be dedicated to R. P. Blackmur, his teacher from Princeton, whom he calls // miglior fabbro and "the greatest English critic since Coleridge." Rehder gracefully declines to argue or engage with other critics, while acknowledging that he has learned much from reading them; his work is not based on new textual discoveries or a new slice of context to illuminate familiar works; rather, he reads some poems and prose texts together and distinguishes in each a different attitude to metaphor, which he quite rightly sees as central to the work of all three and indeed to the project of poetry itself. I found myself wanting to say "a New Critic - not that there's anything wrong with that" in Jerry Seinfeld's defensive tone of voice. Since the book's heart is in close reading, he cannot deal with a wide range of poems, and has chosen to help us tackle some thorny ones, including Stevens's "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" and Crane's "Atlantis" section from The Bridge, rather than those with more surface appeal. He also begins by crediting what the poets themselves have to say about their use of metaphor: Stevens's "Three Academic Pieces," Crane's exchange of letters about the "logic of metaphor" with Harriet Monroe, and Williams's skirmishes with Stevens and objections to Crane provide a handy "compare and contrast" armature on which to hang the readings. So the book will be especially useful to those seeking a scorecard to tell the players apart, and also a good resource to those preparing to teach them. While the claim in the preface that "Metaphor is not an ordinary way of looking at a poet's work" hardly rings true, there is still no better way to see what's particular about a writer's approach than by juxtaposing several, and he has made a good job getting at what is most Stevens about Stevens, most Crane about Crane, and where Williams is most like himself, in constructions most of us will recognize as constructions but nevertheless also . . . recognize. For instance: "Williams wants to possess the object, Crane wants to be possessed by it" (143). "Stevens enjoys arguments [. . .] Williams believes in plain statements. [. . .] Crane struggles with feelings that are almost out of reach or overwhelmingly present" (150). We come away seeing three plausibly distinct ways of answering the question of how imagination relates to reality, how ideas relate or should relate to "things" or "the thing" - and actually the whole question lies in between those two ways of stating it, since Stevens ("not ideas about the thing but the thing itself") has already turned "concreteness" into an abstraction. "Resolutely anti-metaphysical, Williams finds his comfort in reality. [. . .] For Stevens, the motive for metaphor is the need to establish a relation between reality and the imagination. Crane uses the things of this world to reconstruct his feelings and wants to go through them, beyond them, to a meaning, a raison d'etre that feels like wholeness and involves a reconciliation of primary conflicts" (85). Rehder is unconcerned to give an account of "modernism" as such, since he feels period labels detract from an understanding of what makes a poet unique; to him, modernity begins with the increased self-awareness and self-consciousness of the Romantics (especially Wordsworth) and the birth of realism Auerbach identified in Mimesis. …

William Carlos Williams Review, 2009

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2007

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c9S I n TLi8 Issue-6 Do Americans really beieve in a "therapeutic gospel" of salvation on the psy... more c9S I n TLi8 Issue-6 Do Americans really beieve in a "therapeutic gospel" of salvation on the psychotherapist's couch? Jeanne Marecek assesses Eva Moskowitz' In Therapy We Trust, p. 14. i6 The affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky made headlines worldwide, and now a new collection of essays explores its multiple meanings for feminists and others: Micaela di Leonardo reads OurMonica, Ourselves, p. 8. n6 Carry Nation was much more than a hatchet-wielding temperance fanatic: Carol Lasser reviews Fran Grace's enlightening new biography of the early prohibitionist and feminist forerunner, p. 17. .6 Sappho's poetry survives in fragments and her life in a multiplicity of competing myths; Susan Gubar reads Margaret Reynolds' exhaustive compendium of prose, poetry, music and art inspired over more than two millennia by the world's earliest lyric poet, p. 13.-6 What explains the persistence of patriarchy? It's good for business, says Nancy Folbre in The Invisible Heart: Economics and Fami!y Values; Felicia Kornbluh assesses her claim that women's unpaid work underpins society, p. 7. .6 and more...

Plastic surgeon Jacob SarnoffWs vision of total transformation, 1936. From Venus Envy. making bri... more Plastic surgeon Jacob SarnoffWs vision of total transformation, 1936. From Venus Envy. making brighter futures for thousands of girls and women. The matron with too many crows feet around the eyes will have new hope and faith because of plastic surgery on wounded veterans. (p. 137) Aging-in middle-class, middle-aged women-became the target of all these surgeons apparently otherwise unoccupied. One contemporary writer called cosmetic surgery the quintessential product of postwar prosperity. T nHAT THERE IS NO SELF-IMAGE created outside a social context is probably the most important lesson the reader learns, though not for the first time, from Venus Envy. To paraphrase one surgeon, the way we think we look is reason enough to want to look different. The nut of Haiken's historical analysis is that the culture we live in shapes those thoughts, and her research-documented in nearly forty pages of notes so intriguing that they are worth reading in their own right-is most compelling when she examines cosmetic surgeiy motivated by race, ethnicity anid aging. 242 p~e * S16.50 European P ~cn A Serks In Social Thought and Cultwal Critidsm, Lowence a rma, Editor #> EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS Feminist Destinations and Furtber Essays on Virginia Woolf Rachel Bowlby "An exciting volume from a distinguished and very weil established critic of Wool',very much in touch with and a likely influence on current thinking."

behind what W E. B. Du Bois called the veil of American life. But what compels her subjects to of... more behind what W E. B. Du Bois called the veil of American life. But what compels her subjects to offer up, for free, such intimate information, a precious commodity in this confessional age of Oprah and reality TV? Without forums to tell their stories in their own voices and on their own behalf, the poor often must depend on well-intentioned advocates to champion their cause for first-class citizenship. In F/at Broke With Children, Hays knows her subjects share their stories to achieve social vrisibility and inclusion. "They had heard more than once the stereoty,pes labeling them as lazy, dependent, ignorant, prormiscuous, and manipulative cheats. They told their stories, therefore, with the hope that they would be recognized not simply as a composite of cich6s, but as whole persons." If, as I suspect, the same is true for LeBlanc's subjects, then she betrays them. While her tightly woven, insular narrative-its focus on one extended family, its lack of social context-mirrors brilliantly the circumscribed world in which America's poor live, povert) and its attendant ills become an island of societal dysfunction that the mainstream can experience from a distance. If not daunted by book's end, middle-class readers may feel let off the hook, as if the problems of the so-called ghetto are just that, in the ghetto. n Flat Broke lFith) Children, Hays argues that the pressures that constrict the lives of the poor have a stranglehold on us all. Over the last 30 years, she notes, the economic strain of advanced capitalism downsized manufacturing jobs, depressed wages, and destabilized families. Women entering the labor force in the 1970s depressed salaries even further as employers, succumbing to sexism and economic exigencies, no longer felt the need to pay a "breadwinning wage" that would sustain a family. People began to marry later, for shorter periods, even while continuing to welcome children into their lives. The result for many was an increase in divorce and single parenting, "the feminization of poverty," and a rise in welfare usage. Juggling work and famnily amid such flux is tough with a two-income household. For the most vulnerable among us, poor women with children, it's almost impossible. This classic argument of structural inequality Hayrs complicates by examining the cultural, rather than political, significance of reform. As she says, she "join[s] the conservative critics of welfare reform in focusing squarely on the question of values" to indict, not the poor, but the system and policies that make them so. Her analysis focuses on the inherent conflict between two quiintessential American values: independence and the common good. Until the 1970s, Hays argues, this tension was resolved through stark gender roles of breadwinning husbands and stayF-at-home moms. The massive changes in work and family life dashed this dubious bargain, and policy-makers, reeling from upheaval, looked for scapegoats rather than solutions. Welfare reform, consequently, bought into assumptions like those of Charles MIurray in Losng GrouKnd and Lawrence MIead in Bey*nd Entit/ment that old policies encouraged "bad behavior"-namely, lazy freeloaders cynically choosing single parenthood over marriage to get a handout. Of course, this scapegoating logic obscures the law's contradictions. The Pavlovian rewards and sanctions it uses to coerce women into the narrow and untenable "vision of independent, working motherhood" (that is, if the plan of finding a breadwinning husband fails) subvert the very principles the law claims to champion. The low-wage jobs and exploitative workfare assignments won't support inde