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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 29 No. 2

Contents

ARTICLES

Individual Talent and the Will of the People in David Pownall’s Master Class

Pseudo-Psychotic Language in Experimental Theater

Susan Sontag, Franny Phelan, and the Moral Implications of Photographs

Stereotypes and Sentimentality: The Coarser Sieve

Fabrication and Faultline: Language as Experience in Roughing It

Personal Space: The Hidden Element of Cowboy Demeanor

POEMS

Xtofer and Elizabeth

Weather Report

Odyssey

October

Bedtime Stories

Quetzal

Inside the Candle

Easter Morning

Genesis

The Third Day

In a Time of Abundance

Night Reconnaissance

A Father Speaks

REVIEWS

William E. Gienapp; The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856

Gordon Weaver; The American Short Story, 1945-1980

Abstract

in this issue. . .

Music and menace--power and survival: these are the themes, interwoven by David Pownall in his play, Master Class, raised in BYRON NELSON' s probing discussion of Stalinist terror. Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University, Nelson's articles on 17th-century religious radicalism, opera, and modern drama have appeared in a wide variety of journals. He is at work on a book-length study of the role of the Ranters in the English Revolution.

Just how and why do authors of experimental literature indulge the irrational and incomprehensible? This provides MARY D. TOOKEY, SCOTT WOOLRIDGE, and LINDA M. TOOKEY with a context for discussing writing, mental illness, and the connection between them. Mary D. Tookey is Associate Professor of English at Eureka College in Illinois. Scott Woolridge is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the same institution. Linda M. Tookey, who has worked in psychiatric research, is currently a Personnel Management Specialist at the Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, California. She is also the daughter of Mary D. Tookey.

How does perception itself alter reality? Starting with Susan Sontag's view of photography and William Kennedy's novel, Ironweed, PAUL F. GRIFFIN goes on to propose a "chain of meaning" to link actuality and preserved time, photographic, literary, and human. Now teaching in the Humanities program at Elms College in Chicopee, Massachusetts, where he is also Assistant to the Academic Dean, Griffin has published on Blake's lyric poetry and on the image of the family in modern drama.

LOLA HASKINS has published poetry in Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, and many other journals. She has two books of poetry to her credit, Planting the Children (1983) and Castings (1984). She teaches computer science part-time at the University of Florida and lives on a ranch near LaCrosse.

MARIANNE ANDREA was born in Kiev, Russia, and now lives

in New York City. Her poetry has appeared widely in publications in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. She has published one book of poetry, The Fifth Corner (1975). She also writes short stories and essays which have been published in England and the United States. She has been poet-in-residence with the Society for Ethical Culture since 1981 and regularly conducts poetry workshops for several institutions in the New York area.

MICHAEL BURNS teaches literature and writing at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He has had recent work accepted by Southern Review and Light Year. His chapbook of poems, And As for Darkness, was published in 1987.

CHARLES EDWARD EATON has published poetry and prose in many journals including Harper’s, Kenyon Review. Southern Review, and Salmagundi. He has published ten collections of poetry, three volumes of short stories, and a book of art criticism. His newest collection of poetry, New and Selected Poems, 1942-1987, was published in 1987. His poetry has won numerous awards. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

ANN ZOLLER lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has published two books of poetry, Answers from the Bowing Moon (1985) and New Pony on a Carousel (1983), and one chapbook. She has had recent work in Nimrod, Blue Unicorn, Little Balkans Review, and more than a dozen other journals and anthologies.

TRISH RUCKER has had two plays professionally produced in Atlanta. Her poetry has appeared in a number of little magazines and will soon appear in Kansas Quarterly and Literary Review. She lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

ERNEST KROLL, a former newpaperman and United States Government official, makes his home in Washington, D.C. He has published five volumes of poetry. He is the only living author (among thirty-six so honored) to have a passage from one of his poems cut in the granite floor of the Western Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s Capitol.

GEORGE GOTT published two chapbooks of poetry in 1984, Birds and Horses and Watching the River. His poetry has also appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He teaches literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

CLAUDIA BUCKHOLTS has published two books of poetry and also writes fiction. Her poetry has won Grolier and Hopwood awards, and she has received a fellowship for poetry from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

JIM DOUGLAS has published poetry in Cathartic, RE: Artes Liberales, and Separate Doors. He is currently a graduate student in English at Baylor University.

ALLEN HOEY teaches in the writing program at Ithaca College in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Hudson Review, and Southern Humanities Review. He has published several chapbooks, the most recent of which are Work the Tongue Could Understand and Transfigured Autumn (translations of Georg Trakl). His book of poems, A Fire in the Cold House of Being won the 1985 Camden Poetry Award and was published in 1987.

Stereotypes and sentimentality offer a means for high art to speak to popular audiences, says RICHARD M. GARDNER, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin--Stout. A previous article on stereotypes appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, and he has contributed articles to a forthcoming reference compilation on popular American authors. He writes popular poetry and fiction and is now completing a musical comedy to be produced in the Midwest.

PHILIP BURNS traces linguistic experience in Mark Twain's Roughing It as a means of examining Twain's art and the society he was describing. Burns teaches literature and composition at Rhode Island College and the University of Rhode Island, and he is working on a doctoral dissertation on Ezra Pound at the latter institution. This is his first scholarly publication.

Authors JOSEPH V. HICKEY and WILLIAM E. THOMPSON contribute the example of the cowboy to the literature of "personal space." Hickey teaches Anthropology at Emporia State University in Kansas. In 1974 he studied the Pastoral Fulani in Nigeria, and he is currently writing a book about a farming neighborhood in the Kansas Flint Hills. Thompson is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Division of Sociology, Family Sciences, and Anthropology at Emporia State University. He has published numerous articles on social deviance, juvenile delinquency, the Old Order Amish, and the symbolic interactionist approach to various social topics. He is now at work on a textbook he will co-author dealing with juvenile delinquency.

Civil War scholar DUDLEY T. CORNISH, history professor emeritus at Pittsburg State University, has recently seen the reissue of his classic study of black troops in the Civil War, The Sable Arm. He is the co-author of Lincoln's Lee: the Life of Samuel Phillips Lee, 1812-1897, and throughout his career has contributed numerous articles and book reviews to academic journals. He was The Midwest Quarterly' s first editor.

THOMAS E. KENNEDY's book reviews have appeared in Sewanee Review, Chariton Review, and the Hollins Critic, and his fiction and literary criticism have been published in North American Review, Writers Forum, the Literary Review, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.

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