Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued)
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Andrew Gross
Andrew S. Gross is Professor of American Literature at the University of Göttingen and editor-in-chief of theNew American Studies Journal. He is the author ofThe Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature , co-author ofComedy, Avant-Garde, Scandal: Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History , and editor of two special issues ofThe Wallace Stevens Journal.
Abstract
This essay explores how the poet Jorie Graham taps into a pastoral tradition to challenge the “end of history” thesis, and the concept of narrative it depends on, as articulated by Fukuyama after the fall of the Soviet Union. The occasion is provided by the The Best American Poetryof 1990. The anthology was edited then – and now – by David Lehman, who works with a different guest editor each year. In 1990Graham did the honors, pursuing a principle of selection – and composition – that rejected the celebration of liberal triumph evident in Lehman’s Fukuyama-inspired introduction. Lehman and Fukuyama thought, at the end of the Cold War, that history had ended in freedom. Graham, on the contrary, argued that freedom involved resisting endings, both formally and as postulated endpoints of historical narratives. The conflict between those who embrace endings and those reject them turns out to be a long one, reaching back into the earliest eclogues, which can be understood as collections of songs, much like anthologies, collected in the shadow of epoch-making events such as the end of the Roman Empire. The poems in the 1990 anthology reflect this tradition of rejecting endings and – as a principle of composition, anthologizing, and politics – carrying on. Graham’s “Manifest Destiny,” written at this moment, also carries on by pushing pastoral conventions in new directions.
Abstract
This essay explores how the poet Jorie Graham taps into a pastoral tradition to challenge the “end of history” thesis, and the concept of narrative it depends on, as articulated by Fukuyama after the fall of the Soviet Union. The occasion is provided by the The Best American Poetryof 1990. The anthology was edited then – and now – by David Lehman, who works with a different guest editor each year. In 1990Graham did the honors, pursuing a principle of selection – and composition – that rejected the celebration of liberal triumph evident in Lehman’s Fukuyama-inspired introduction. Lehman and Fukuyama thought, at the end of the Cold War, that history had ended in freedom. Graham, on the contrary, argued that freedom involved resisting endings, both formally and as postulated endpoints of historical narratives. The conflict between those who embrace endings and those reject them turns out to be a long one, reaching back into the earliest eclogues, which can be understood as collections of songs, much like anthologies, collected in the shadow of epoch-making events such as the end of the Roman Empire. The poems in the 1990 anthology reflect this tradition of rejecting endings and – as a principle of composition, anthologizing, and politics – carrying on. Graham’s “Manifest Destiny,” written at this moment, also carries on by pushing pastoral conventions in new directions.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
