Jesse Zuba | Delaware State University-USA (original) (raw)
Papers by Jesse Zuba
Journal of Modern Literature
Twentieth-Century Literature
Books by Jesse Zuba
“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, descr... more “We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, /The First Book/ explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of poets ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, Jesse Zuba illuminates the centrality of the first book to twentieth-century American literary culture, where it serves as the site of complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike.
Zuba investigates poets’ diverse responses to the question of beginning a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. He shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson’s /The Arrivistes/ to Ken Chen’s /Juvenilia/ stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for development even as it averts that demand.
Combining literary analysis with cultural history, /The First Book/ will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.
From the Back Cover:
"A fascinating story of poetic debuts. With nuanced understanding as well as clear-eyed realism, Jesse Zuba traces the self-fashioning that goes into the making of careers, allowing poets to strike a delicate balance between institutional demands and personal aspirations."--Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
“Exploring the professionalization of poetic culture over the last hundred years, /The First Book/ represents a confluence of often mutually exclusive kinds of excellence: Zuba is at once an adept close reader of poems, a scrupulous literary historian, a curator of cultures popular and unpopular, and synthesizer of sophisticated critical thinking. Even more rarely, Zuba writes with a quietly stylistic panache that makes /The First Book/ an uncommon pleasure to read.”—James Longenbach, University of Rochester
“/The First Book/ combines social theory, cultural and publishing history, and close attention to individual poems to argue that notions of the poet’s career, or the poet’s profession, have shaped poems, books, and poetic oeuvres in the American twentieth century in ways that prior critics have not seen. Zuba’s claims are true, new, and important.”—Stephen Burt, Harvard University
Drafts by Jesse Zuba
Though interdisciplinary projects in cultural criminology incorporate a variety of literary tex... more Though interdisciplinary projects in cultural criminology incorporate a variety of literary texts to illustrate the concepts, questions, and practices under study, they show a tendency to privilege narrative over lyric. I suggest that this omission is a byproduct of lyricization – the process through which poetry is reduced to lyric, and lyric is reduced to a self-enclosed mode of private utterance, purged of any relevance to the realities of its environment. The New Lyric Studies enables a critique of this caricature that illuminates the ways in which poetry might prove useful to the examination of something other than its own, ostensibly delicate and restricted field of operations.
I test this hypothesis through a reading of Yusef Komunyakaa’s early poetry, which demonstrates the usefulness of lyric to the pedagogy of cultural criminology, particularly in the way that it explores personhood in its precarious subjection to the dominant cultural discourses as well as in its capacity for agency, understanding, and empathy. The poems illuminate the dynamic, fiercely emotional notion of subjectivity that lies at the heart of the field. In doing so, they show that lyric poems are likely to prove just as useful as narrative texts to the study of cultural criminology, as well as to any enterprise that values understanding the lived experience of persons in its full complexity and intensity.
Talks by Jesse Zuba
Carver in the Age of Trump a valuable opportunity to consider the perspective of that demographic... more Carver in the Age of Trump a valuable opportunity to consider the perspective of that demographic in detail. Carver's work reminds readers that these are often " decent men " who have been dealt bad hands " in a plentiful world " and therefore " behave badly " (Weber 37): Doreen Ober's willingness to play along with Earl's diet scheme in " They're Not Your Husband, " for example, suggests her understanding that Earl is a victim of uncontrollable circumstances. But if Carver's work can foster sympathy across the political divide in the Age of Trump, it also offers a critique of these men's behavior. Carver repeatedly shows how the same social and economic anxieties that energize Trump supporters prompt toxic assertions of masculine privilege in the men of Carver country, rather than productive coping strategies. Examining the ways in which " What Is It? " " A Serious Talk, " and other stories illustrate this dynamic, this presentation will suggest that the same ideal of self-reliant manhood that Trump aims to project provokes in Carver's men symbolic displays of power and authority that are as harmful as they are ineffectual.
Literary debuts both launch and define careers, and have a unique impact on the literary marketpl... more Literary debuts both launch and define careers, and have a unique impact on the literary marketplace. In /The First Book/, Jesse Zuba has written a cultural history and literary analysis of “first books," focusing on poetic debuts, that will intrigue writers and publishers alike. Recently, Zuba spoke to PUP about his first book, /The First Book/.
“Still Lost”: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Academic Fiction Tracing “Oscar’s progr... more “Still Lost”: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Academic Fiction
Tracing “Oscar’s progression from inauthentic diasporic male to an assimilated, unsentimental un-virgin” (Machado Saez 538), Junot Diaz’s novel seems to exemplify the logic of the student-centered college novel as a bildungsroman focusing on the growth of a “character who must in the end be allowed to escape [the university’s] gravitational pull” (Connor 69-70). The novel is academic through and through: littered with footnotes based on research in an archive of Oscar’s unpublished papers, the novel is narrated by Yunior, who rooms with Oscar at Rutgers University and later teaches “composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College” (Diaz 326). Nicknamed “Mr. Collegeboy” while still in high school, Oscar dreams of finding among the “thousands of young people” at Rutgers “someone like him” (Diaz 49). And yet the criticism devoted to the novel fails to register its obsession with academe. I argue that this failure sheds light on the limitations of canonical academic fiction, which tends to privilege a picture of the school as a place of poignant transformation for students and professors alike.
Though Rutgers serves as the setting for nearly half of the novel, the reader encounters not a single professor or college classroom, and virtually all of the topoi of academic fiction – from frat parties and parent visits to sex scandals and committee meetings – are absent. Extracurricular attempts to educate Oscar – most notably Yunior’s attempt to “fix [his] life” (Diaz 175) – not only fail, but leave little potential for redemptive rebellion, and Oscar moves back home after graduation to teach at his old high school, where he’s just as miserable as he was when he left it. Insisting that the book is nothing if not a college novel, I suggest that Oscar’s conspicuously static selfhood challenges the image that pervades canonical academic fiction of the university as a “closed world” (Connor 69) enfolding a uniquely defined “university community” with its own “quirky, pedantic, vengeful, legalistic, and inhumane” (Showalter 119) means of producing change.
Works Cited
Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History, 1950-1995. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007.
Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
The Kronstadt Moment – The Road to Damascus From Firstborn to Vita Nova: Louise Glück’s Born-A... more The Kronstadt Moment – The Road to Damascus
From Firstborn to Vita Nova: Louise Glück’s Born-Again Professionalism
In “The Education of the Poet” Louise Glück critiques the notion that “creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition” and instead evokes the writing life in terms that recall the Puritan idea of vocation. According to that idea, the individual is unable to will salvation and so seeks “signs of election” through labor in a calling (Weber 79). As a result, the career is defined by a persistent crisis produced by the tension between the craving for successes that signal assurance of election and the knowledge that such assurance can never be complete. This crisis is both amplified and complicated in the field of poetry, which can be viewed, according to Pierre Bourdieu, as a “game of ‘loser wins’” (39) in which authority and prestige are inversely related to conventional forms of success. How does Glück come by her self-avowed “powerful sense of vocation” (108) if she can neither will the demonstration of her poetic gifts nor take publications, profits, or honors as trustworthy signs of election?
This paper argues that Glück’s work is representative of a post-1945 American literary culture largely defined by a sense of vocational crisis that demands to be understood in the context of Protestant theology and, more specifically, the notion of the calling, which serves as a foundation for the ideology of professionalism. I show how that crisis registers in Glück’s career as a tendency to return repeatedly to the stance of the beginner. While her poetic rebirths accommodate the professional imperative for rationalized development insofar as they project a course of steady growth, they also reflect the indeterminacy of a vocational path governed by the doctrine of election through grace alone. I use close readings of the lead-off poems in each of Glück’s collections from Firstborn (1968) to Vita Nova (2001) to suggest that this practice of authorization via serial re-initiation defines a complex response to an increasingly professionalized contemporary poetry scene deeply rooted in America’s Protestant past.
Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randall Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print.
Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994. Print.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism. Ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
Syllabi by Jesse Zuba
Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys African ... more Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys African American literature from the end of the Harlem Renaissance through the period of the Black Arts Movement to the present. The primary objective is to gain an understanding of the various ways in which African American literature both shapes and is shaped by the changing conditions under which it is produced, including segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War, among others. Students develop critical thinking and communication skills through discussion and exams as they cultivate knowledge of texts covering a wide range of genres, themes, styles, and points of view. Key topics to which the course returns throughout the semester include the representation of race and gender, social and economic mobility, freedom, community, identity, and nationalism, among others. Students will also reinforce analytical, critical thinking, and communication skills; build content knowledge; and expand computer and information literacy by pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary, digital humanities project culminating in the presentation of a research paper. A blog will be used to host course-relevant internet resources discovered and annotated by students. The research paper will incorporate one or more texts from the syllabus, internet resources from the blog, and at least one non-literary primary text (film, painting, photograph, song, etc.) so as to illuminate relations between literary works and the social, political, economic, and artistic culture as a whole.
“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, descr... more “We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, /The First Book/ explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of poets ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, Jesse Zuba illuminates the centrality of the first book to twentieth-century American literary culture, where it serves as the site of complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike.
Zuba investigates poets’ diverse responses to the question of beginning a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. He shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson’s /The Arrivistes/ to Ken Chen’s /Juvenilia/ stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for development even as it averts that demand.
Combining literary analysis with cultural history, /The First Book/ will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.
From the Back Cover:
"A fascinating story of poetic debuts. With nuanced understanding as well as clear-eyed realism, Jesse Zuba traces the self-fashioning that goes into the making of careers, allowing poets to strike a delicate balance between institutional demands and personal aspirations."--Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
“Exploring the professionalization of poetic culture over the last hundred years, /The First Book/ represents a confluence of often mutually exclusive kinds of excellence: Zuba is at once an adept close reader of poems, a scrupulous literary historian, a curator of cultures popular and unpopular, and synthesizer of sophisticated critical thinking. Even more rarely, Zuba writes with a quietly stylistic panache that makes /The First Book/ an uncommon pleasure to read.”—James Longenbach, University of Rochester
“/The First Book/ combines social theory, cultural and publishing history, and close attention to individual poems to argue that notions of the poet’s career, or the poet’s profession, have shaped poems, books, and poetic oeuvres in the American twentieth century in ways that prior critics have not seen. Zuba’s claims are true, new, and important.”—Stephen Burt, Harvard University
Though interdisciplinary projects in cultural criminology incorporate a variety of literary tex... more Though interdisciplinary projects in cultural criminology incorporate a variety of literary texts to illustrate the concepts, questions, and practices under study, they show a tendency to privilege narrative over lyric. I suggest that this omission is a byproduct of lyricization – the process through which poetry is reduced to lyric, and lyric is reduced to a self-enclosed mode of private utterance, purged of any relevance to the realities of its environment. The New Lyric Studies enables a critique of this caricature that illuminates the ways in which poetry might prove useful to the examination of something other than its own, ostensibly delicate and restricted field of operations.
I test this hypothesis through a reading of Yusef Komunyakaa’s early poetry, which demonstrates the usefulness of lyric to the pedagogy of cultural criminology, particularly in the way that it explores personhood in its precarious subjection to the dominant cultural discourses as well as in its capacity for agency, understanding, and empathy. The poems illuminate the dynamic, fiercely emotional notion of subjectivity that lies at the heart of the field. In doing so, they show that lyric poems are likely to prove just as useful as narrative texts to the study of cultural criminology, as well as to any enterprise that values understanding the lived experience of persons in its full complexity and intensity.
Carver in the Age of Trump a valuable opportunity to consider the perspective of that demographic... more Carver in the Age of Trump a valuable opportunity to consider the perspective of that demographic in detail. Carver's work reminds readers that these are often " decent men " who have been dealt bad hands " in a plentiful world " and therefore " behave badly " (Weber 37): Doreen Ober's willingness to play along with Earl's diet scheme in " They're Not Your Husband, " for example, suggests her understanding that Earl is a victim of uncontrollable circumstances. But if Carver's work can foster sympathy across the political divide in the Age of Trump, it also offers a critique of these men's behavior. Carver repeatedly shows how the same social and economic anxieties that energize Trump supporters prompt toxic assertions of masculine privilege in the men of Carver country, rather than productive coping strategies. Examining the ways in which " What Is It? " " A Serious Talk, " and other stories illustrate this dynamic, this presentation will suggest that the same ideal of self-reliant manhood that Trump aims to project provokes in Carver's men symbolic displays of power and authority that are as harmful as they are ineffectual.
Literary debuts both launch and define careers, and have a unique impact on the literary marketpl... more Literary debuts both launch and define careers, and have a unique impact on the literary marketplace. In /The First Book/, Jesse Zuba has written a cultural history and literary analysis of “first books," focusing on poetic debuts, that will intrigue writers and publishers alike. Recently, Zuba spoke to PUP about his first book, /The First Book/.
“Still Lost”: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Academic Fiction Tracing “Oscar’s progr... more “Still Lost”: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Academic Fiction
Tracing “Oscar’s progression from inauthentic diasporic male to an assimilated, unsentimental un-virgin” (Machado Saez 538), Junot Diaz’s novel seems to exemplify the logic of the student-centered college novel as a bildungsroman focusing on the growth of a “character who must in the end be allowed to escape [the university’s] gravitational pull” (Connor 69-70). The novel is academic through and through: littered with footnotes based on research in an archive of Oscar’s unpublished papers, the novel is narrated by Yunior, who rooms with Oscar at Rutgers University and later teaches “composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College” (Diaz 326). Nicknamed “Mr. Collegeboy” while still in high school, Oscar dreams of finding among the “thousands of young people” at Rutgers “someone like him” (Diaz 49). And yet the criticism devoted to the novel fails to register its obsession with academe. I argue that this failure sheds light on the limitations of canonical academic fiction, which tends to privilege a picture of the school as a place of poignant transformation for students and professors alike.
Though Rutgers serves as the setting for nearly half of the novel, the reader encounters not a single professor or college classroom, and virtually all of the topoi of academic fiction – from frat parties and parent visits to sex scandals and committee meetings – are absent. Extracurricular attempts to educate Oscar – most notably Yunior’s attempt to “fix [his] life” (Diaz 175) – not only fail, but leave little potential for redemptive rebellion, and Oscar moves back home after graduation to teach at his old high school, where he’s just as miserable as he was when he left it. Insisting that the book is nothing if not a college novel, I suggest that Oscar’s conspicuously static selfhood challenges the image that pervades canonical academic fiction of the university as a “closed world” (Connor 69) enfolding a uniquely defined “university community” with its own “quirky, pedantic, vengeful, legalistic, and inhumane” (Showalter 119) means of producing change.
Works Cited
Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History, 1950-1995. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007.
Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
The Kronstadt Moment – The Road to Damascus From Firstborn to Vita Nova: Louise Glück’s Born-A... more The Kronstadt Moment – The Road to Damascus
From Firstborn to Vita Nova: Louise Glück’s Born-Again Professionalism
In “The Education of the Poet” Louise Glück critiques the notion that “creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition” and instead evokes the writing life in terms that recall the Puritan idea of vocation. According to that idea, the individual is unable to will salvation and so seeks “signs of election” through labor in a calling (Weber 79). As a result, the career is defined by a persistent crisis produced by the tension between the craving for successes that signal assurance of election and the knowledge that such assurance can never be complete. This crisis is both amplified and complicated in the field of poetry, which can be viewed, according to Pierre Bourdieu, as a “game of ‘loser wins’” (39) in which authority and prestige are inversely related to conventional forms of success. How does Glück come by her self-avowed “powerful sense of vocation” (108) if she can neither will the demonstration of her poetic gifts nor take publications, profits, or honors as trustworthy signs of election?
This paper argues that Glück’s work is representative of a post-1945 American literary culture largely defined by a sense of vocational crisis that demands to be understood in the context of Protestant theology and, more specifically, the notion of the calling, which serves as a foundation for the ideology of professionalism. I show how that crisis registers in Glück’s career as a tendency to return repeatedly to the stance of the beginner. While her poetic rebirths accommodate the professional imperative for rationalized development insofar as they project a course of steady growth, they also reflect the indeterminacy of a vocational path governed by the doctrine of election through grace alone. I use close readings of the lead-off poems in each of Glück’s collections from Firstborn (1968) to Vita Nova (2001) to suggest that this practice of authorization via serial re-initiation defines a complex response to an increasingly professionalized contemporary poetry scene deeply rooted in America’s Protestant past.
Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randall Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print.
Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994. Print.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism. Ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys African ... more Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys African American literature from the end of the Harlem Renaissance through the period of the Black Arts Movement to the present. The primary objective is to gain an understanding of the various ways in which African American literature both shapes and is shaped by the changing conditions under which it is produced, including segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War, among others. Students develop critical thinking and communication skills through discussion and exams as they cultivate knowledge of texts covering a wide range of genres, themes, styles, and points of view. Key topics to which the course returns throughout the semester include the representation of race and gender, social and economic mobility, freedom, community, identity, and nationalism, among others. Students will also reinforce analytical, critical thinking, and communication skills; build content knowledge; and expand computer and information literacy by pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary, digital humanities project culminating in the presentation of a research paper. A blog will be used to host course-relevant internet resources discovered and annotated by students. The research paper will incorporate one or more texts from the syllabus, internet resources from the blog, and at least one non-literary primary text (film, painting, photograph, song, etc.) so as to illuminate relations between literary works and the social, political, economic, and artistic culture as a whole.
Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys modern d... more Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys modern drama across several national traditions from the 1890s to the 1990s. The main objective is to gain understanding of the ways in which these plays both shape and are shaped by the changing conditions under which they were produced, though we also pay particular attention to the evolution of drama as a distinct form of cultural production with its own history and unique aesthetic considerations. Students develop critical thinking and writing skills through discussion, exams, and an essay. Key topics to which we'll return over the course of the semester include class, gender, race, social mobility, tradition, performance, the American Dream, modernism, and postmodernism, among others. Written work must be submitted on time to receive full credit. Students sign up to lead discussion three times during the semester. Discussion leaders guide in-class discussion through a series of questions related to the reading assigned. Policies Attendance: Students may be excused for four absences over the course of the semester. Five or more absences will result in substantial deductions from the final grade for the course. Lateness to class will result in deductions from the final grade for the course. Assignments: All written workmust be submitted in order to receive a grade of C or above. Plagiarism: Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty will result in failing the course.
Assignment This critical writing assignment asks you to discuss any one or two of the plays on th... more Assignment This critical writing assignment asks you to discuss any one or two of the plays on the syllabus. The topic is up to you to choose, though it is important that you do more than rehash class discussion. Given the length of the essay, you should focus on a topic that doesn't demand extensive background information, but instead allows you to make a clear, compelling thesis claim and support it with textual evidence efficiently. Incorporate one secondary source (book chapter or scholarly article) into your discussion and document it, as well as your primary source/s, using MLA style. Submit your essay as a pdf document via Blackboard
Assignment This critical writing assignment asks you to discuss any one or two of the texts on th... more Assignment This critical writing assignment asks you to discuss any one or two of the texts on the syllabus. The topic is up to you to choose, though it is important that you do more than rehash class discussion. Given the length of the essay, you should focus on a topic that doesn't demand extensive background information, but instead allows you to make a clear, compelling thesis claim and support it with textual evidence efficiently.
