Patrick Chura - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Patrick Chura
Socialism and democracy, Apr 8, 2024
Journal for The Study of Radicalism, Jul 1, 2011
The Eugene O'Neill Review, 2016
This novel tells two stories, one based on solid historical research and one based on pure specul... more This novel tells two stories, one based on solid historical research and one based on pure speculation. The title's "true legendary love triangle" is of course the O'Neill-Louise Bryant liaison of 1916-1918, carried on while Bryant was the lover and later the wife of John Reed. The book's conjectural "secret never before revealed" is divulged in the prologue. Around the time O'Neill began his affair with Bryant, he also had a drunken one-night stand with a "pretty British girl" named Natalie who became pregnant with his child. A theater groupie and admirer of Provincetown's "radical Greenwich Village crowd, " Natalie, sixteen, seduced O'Neill by convincing him that she was older. Sent to the country to stay with an aunt when her parents discovered the pregnancy, she never told O'Neill of her plight and gave birth to an "illegitimate secret daughter" before returning to London the next year. The novel's narrator, a Massachusetts undergraduate on a study-abroad semester in London, meets and quickly befriends that secret daughter, Simone Waverly, about fifty years later, when Simone is a recent widow seeking new relationships. At their first meeting, Simone and the American are
The Eugene O'Neill Review
While working for the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago in 1937, leftist playwright Shirley Grah... more While working for the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago in 1937, leftist playwright Shirley Graham created a “Negro adaptation” of The Hairy Ape that altered O’Neill’s script and inserted an entirely new scene. The play was never produced because O’Neill denied Graham’s request to perform it and disparaged the work as an example of “freak theatre where white plays are faked into black plays.” This article looks closely at Graham’s adaptation in order to consider its significance, arguing that the race-determined changes Graham made to O’Neill’s script do not distort the play but elicit a layered African American presence. As a tool for understanding this presence, this article adopts a critical approach practiced in lectures delivered in 1990 by Toni Morrison, which restore legitimacy to Graham’s play and offer a model for fresh interpretation of O’Neill’s oeuvre.
Margaret Fuller's reading of Joseph Straszcwicz's The Life of Countess Emily Plater in 18... more Margaret Fuller's reading of Joseph Straszcwicz's The Life of Countess Emily Plater in 1844 apparently made a profound impression on the American feminist-transcendentalist. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller included several admiring passages about Emily Plater and suggested a portrait of the Vilnius-born countess for the work's frontispiece. Selecting Plater as the emblem of her book showed that Fuller had considered the meaning of Plater's life and wanted readers of Woman in the Nineteenth Century to do the same. Fuller's strong response to the countess was grounded not only on the gender barrier transgression Plater embodied as a female military figure, but on a number of biographical details that the two brilliant and forward thinking women had in common. Looking at Woman in the Nineteenth Century and The Life of Countess Emily Pinter side-by-side suggests that Straszewicz's biography of Plater was a considerable influence on Fuller's pioneer...
The Eugene O'Neill Review
The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism, 2019
This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class ide... more This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.
African American Studies Center, 2013
Eugene O'Neill Review, 2014
Eugene O'Neill Review, 2018
COPYRIGHT © 2019 THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY PARK, PA For almost four decades, ... more COPYRIGHT © 2019 THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY PARK, PA For almost four decades, Cleveland’s Ensemble Theatre has earned a reputation as a favorable venue for Eugene O’Neill’s work. In the last four years alone, the company has offered a run of strong productions, including The Iceman Cometh, Beyond the Horizon, “Anna Christie,” and now a thought-provoking and timely interpretation of The Hairy Ape, directed by Ian Wolfgang Hinz. In a conversation before the show, Hinz shared with me his view that The Hairy Ape is a “challenging” work to stage. The success of this relatively simple production demonstrated that despite its mix of realist and expressionist elements, O’Neill’s play doesn’t require elaborate visual or technical effects to be engaging and socially relevant. The current Ensemble Theatre performance space, a slightly elevated open square platform with seating on three sides, supports intimate stagings that situate actors and audience on common ground. This ...
Acknowledgments Chapter One: Vital Contact Chapter Two: "Resident Gentry" in Melville, ... more Acknowledgments Chapter One: Vital Contact Chapter Two: "Resident Gentry" in Melville, Hawthorne, Jewett, James and Howells Chapter Three: Ernest Poole, Max Eastman and the Legend of John Reed Chapter Four: Upton Sinclair's "Coal War" and Dilemmas of Class Transvestiture Chapter Five: "Spiritual Adventures" of Social Workers in Eugene O'Neill, Elia Peattie, and Clara Laughlin Chapter Six: The Genteel Radical in the "Years Between": Sinclair's Oil! and Boston Chapter Seven: "Alternative Initiatives" of Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Wright Notes Bibliography Index
Eugene O'Neill Review, 2013
Peace & Change, 2018
The Kent State and Jackson State shootings of May 1970 were not directly related, yet the two atr... more The Kent State and Jackson State shootings of May 1970 were not directly related, yet the two atrocities have become "indelibly linked" in popular memory. This article draws from recent oral histories and ethnographic observations of commemorative events to shift the analytical frame toward attention to essential differences in the shooting contexts, arguing that Jackson State was not "the South's Kent State" but a "Mississippi phenomenon" best understood as a portent of ideologies at the core of the current Black Lives Matter movement. The long overdue attention now being given antiblack police brutality offers a vocabulary for reinterpreting Jackson State, enabling new conclusions. First, Kent State did not cause Jackson state, but the killings in Ohio did prompt a false equating of events in Kent and Jackson as similar antiwar protests. Second, this process of collective remembering, furthered by some discourses emanating from Kent State University, obfuscates intrinsic truths about race in America. Finally, conversation surrounding Black Lives Matter offers the chance to reassess the tragedies and remember them in ways that bring clarity to political and cultural structures of the present day.
Eugene O Neill Review, 2013
Socialism and democracy, Apr 8, 2024
Journal for The Study of Radicalism, Jul 1, 2011
The Eugene O'Neill Review, 2016
This novel tells two stories, one based on solid historical research and one based on pure specul... more This novel tells two stories, one based on solid historical research and one based on pure speculation. The title's "true legendary love triangle" is of course the O'Neill-Louise Bryant liaison of 1916-1918, carried on while Bryant was the lover and later the wife of John Reed. The book's conjectural "secret never before revealed" is divulged in the prologue. Around the time O'Neill began his affair with Bryant, he also had a drunken one-night stand with a "pretty British girl" named Natalie who became pregnant with his child. A theater groupie and admirer of Provincetown's "radical Greenwich Village crowd, " Natalie, sixteen, seduced O'Neill by convincing him that she was older. Sent to the country to stay with an aunt when her parents discovered the pregnancy, she never told O'Neill of her plight and gave birth to an "illegitimate secret daughter" before returning to London the next year. The novel's narrator, a Massachusetts undergraduate on a study-abroad semester in London, meets and quickly befriends that secret daughter, Simone Waverly, about fifty years later, when Simone is a recent widow seeking new relationships. At their first meeting, Simone and the American are
The Eugene O'Neill Review
While working for the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago in 1937, leftist playwright Shirley Grah... more While working for the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago in 1937, leftist playwright Shirley Graham created a “Negro adaptation” of The Hairy Ape that altered O’Neill’s script and inserted an entirely new scene. The play was never produced because O’Neill denied Graham’s request to perform it and disparaged the work as an example of “freak theatre where white plays are faked into black plays.” This article looks closely at Graham’s adaptation in order to consider its significance, arguing that the race-determined changes Graham made to O’Neill’s script do not distort the play but elicit a layered African American presence. As a tool for understanding this presence, this article adopts a critical approach practiced in lectures delivered in 1990 by Toni Morrison, which restore legitimacy to Graham’s play and offer a model for fresh interpretation of O’Neill’s oeuvre.
Margaret Fuller's reading of Joseph Straszcwicz's The Life of Countess Emily Plater in 18... more Margaret Fuller's reading of Joseph Straszcwicz's The Life of Countess Emily Plater in 1844 apparently made a profound impression on the American feminist-transcendentalist. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller included several admiring passages about Emily Plater and suggested a portrait of the Vilnius-born countess for the work's frontispiece. Selecting Plater as the emblem of her book showed that Fuller had considered the meaning of Plater's life and wanted readers of Woman in the Nineteenth Century to do the same. Fuller's strong response to the countess was grounded not only on the gender barrier transgression Plater embodied as a female military figure, but on a number of biographical details that the two brilliant and forward thinking women had in common. Looking at Woman in the Nineteenth Century and The Life of Countess Emily Pinter side-by-side suggests that Straszewicz's biography of Plater was a considerable influence on Fuller's pioneer...
The Eugene O'Neill Review
The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism, 2019
This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class ide... more This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.
African American Studies Center, 2013
Eugene O'Neill Review, 2014
Eugene O'Neill Review, 2018
COPYRIGHT © 2019 THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY PARK, PA For almost four decades, ... more COPYRIGHT © 2019 THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY PARK, PA For almost four decades, Cleveland’s Ensemble Theatre has earned a reputation as a favorable venue for Eugene O’Neill’s work. In the last four years alone, the company has offered a run of strong productions, including The Iceman Cometh, Beyond the Horizon, “Anna Christie,” and now a thought-provoking and timely interpretation of The Hairy Ape, directed by Ian Wolfgang Hinz. In a conversation before the show, Hinz shared with me his view that The Hairy Ape is a “challenging” work to stage. The success of this relatively simple production demonstrated that despite its mix of realist and expressionist elements, O’Neill’s play doesn’t require elaborate visual or technical effects to be engaging and socially relevant. The current Ensemble Theatre performance space, a slightly elevated open square platform with seating on three sides, supports intimate stagings that situate actors and audience on common ground. This ...
Acknowledgments Chapter One: Vital Contact Chapter Two: "Resident Gentry" in Melville, ... more Acknowledgments Chapter One: Vital Contact Chapter Two: "Resident Gentry" in Melville, Hawthorne, Jewett, James and Howells Chapter Three: Ernest Poole, Max Eastman and the Legend of John Reed Chapter Four: Upton Sinclair's "Coal War" and Dilemmas of Class Transvestiture Chapter Five: "Spiritual Adventures" of Social Workers in Eugene O'Neill, Elia Peattie, and Clara Laughlin Chapter Six: The Genteel Radical in the "Years Between": Sinclair's Oil! and Boston Chapter Seven: "Alternative Initiatives" of Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Wright Notes Bibliography Index
Eugene O'Neill Review, 2013
Peace & Change, 2018
The Kent State and Jackson State shootings of May 1970 were not directly related, yet the two atr... more The Kent State and Jackson State shootings of May 1970 were not directly related, yet the two atrocities have become "indelibly linked" in popular memory. This article draws from recent oral histories and ethnographic observations of commemorative events to shift the analytical frame toward attention to essential differences in the shooting contexts, arguing that Jackson State was not "the South's Kent State" but a "Mississippi phenomenon" best understood as a portent of ideologies at the core of the current Black Lives Matter movement. The long overdue attention now being given antiblack police brutality offers a vocabulary for reinterpreting Jackson State, enabling new conclusions. First, Kent State did not cause Jackson state, but the killings in Ohio did prompt a false equating of events in Kent and Jackson as similar antiwar protests. Second, this process of collective remembering, furthered by some discourses emanating from Kent State University, obfuscates intrinsic truths about race in America. Finally, conversation surrounding Black Lives Matter offers the chance to reassess the tragedies and remember them in ways that bring clarity to political and cultural structures of the present day.
Eugene O Neill Review, 2013