Their Labyrinth Mouths of History

Article Sidebar

Open / Download PDF
Published: Dec 10, 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2020-2-0178
Keywords:
Hart Crane The Bridge American Poetry Brooklyn Bridge John Roebling Josef Stella Myth of America Mikhail Bakhtin

Main Article Content

Marcela Sulak
Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Abstract

This paper outlines reading strategies to help map Hart Crane’s book-length poem, The Bridge, as a repository of American runes and writing. Contextualizing the poem in the philosophical, historical, and popular culture that influenced its creation, we can examine Hart Crane’s linguistic condensation, puns, and etymological play as techniques for balancing the clash between eternity and secular history upon which America was founded, rehearsed in The Bridge in the clash between secular a-temporality and the historical moment.

Article Details

How to Cite
Sulak, M. “Their Labyrinth Mouths of History”. Linguaculture, vol. 11, no. 2, Dec. 2020, pp. 135-44, doi:10.47743/lincu-2020-2-0178.
Issue
Vol. 11 No. 2 (2020)
Section
Articles
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Marcela Sulak, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Marcela Sulak is the author of the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds; her third poetry collection, City of Sky Papers is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press, where she has previously published Decency and Immigrant. She has co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. A 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, her fourth translation, Twenty Girls to Envy Me. Selected Poems of Orit Gidali was nominated for a 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She hosts the podcast “Israel in Translation,” edits The Ilanot Review, and is Associate Professor of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Bakhtin, M. M. “Discourse Typology in Prose.” Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislas Matejka and Krytyna Pomorska (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1971) 176-99.

Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986

Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane. Ed. Brom Weber. New York: Doubleday, 1966.

Crane, Hart. The Letters of Hart Crane 1916-1932. Ed. Brom Weber. New York: Hermitage House, 1952.

Crane, Hart. O My Land, My Friends! The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. Ed. Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1977.

Giles, Paul. Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986

Jaffe, Irma Blumenthal. Joseph Stella. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Crane, Hart. "Joseph Stella and Hart Crane. The Brooklyn Bridge." American Art Journal 1 (Fall 1969) 98-107.

Knox, George. "Crane and Stella: Conjunctions of Painterly and Poetic Worlds." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 12:4 (Winter, 1971) 680-707.

Ouspensky, P. D. Tertium Organum. Trans. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon. New York: Vintage Books, 1920.

Steinman, D. B. The Builders of the Bridge. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945. Trachtenberg, Alan. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Steinman, D. B."The Shadow of a Myth". Hart Crane. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982. 111-130.

Wiliams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: New Direction's Paperback. 1956.