This essay offers an early chapter in the conjoined history of poetry and performance art, literary criticism and performance studies. Beginning in the mid-1950s and with increasing fervor through the 1960s, American poetry lived simultaneously in print, on vinyl, and in embodied performance. Amid this environment of multimedia publicity, an oddly private poetry emerged. The essay locates confessional poetry in the performance-rich context of its birth and interrogates not only its textual voice but also its embodied, performed breath. Focusing on early confessional work by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, this essay conducts side-by-side “readings” of printed poems and recorded performances and suggests that confessional refers to an intermedial, print-performance style—a particular logic for capturing personal performances in print form and for breathing performances back out of the printed page.

While it has been productive to consider the creative friendship of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell as grounded in a “shared experience of outsider-hood,” their correspondence and the poems they inspired each other to write reveal a shared attraction to conventional imagery of communal belonging—national allegiance, heterosexual domesticity, and nostalgia for the classical realism of nineteenth-century novels. Bishop and Lowell were a queer couple for many reasons, but I argue that their conflation of conventionality and social critique resonates strongly with recent theories of counterculture in reflecting the possibility—often taken to be a nightmare of lyric poets—that one's inner life is inhabited and shaped by another.

This essay extends the study of disability and masculinity representations by exploring the transformational possibilities of poetry as exemplified in the work of Tom Andrews, Floyd Skloot, and Kenny Fries. It argues that lyricism as a process of invention and play enacts both disability and male identity as equally unfixed and that through an “accidental poetics” each author engages with maleness as a continually renegotiated experience necessitated in part by the conditions of disability. Challenging norms that pertain to them as men with disabilities, resisting the imposition of controlling ideological narratives, Skloot, Fries, and Andrews revise themselves as textual bodies whose unruliness is instantiated and celebrated in the unique structural and figurative moves of verse.

The poetry of passenger flight, especially in the early years of the jet age, is exceptional in illuminating the perceptual, affective, and ethical confusions of the global perspective. Offering readings of James Merrill's “Flying from Byzantium,” Elizabeth Bishop's “Night City,” Amiri Baraka's “The Nation Is like Ourselves,” and Derek Walcott's “The Fortunate Traveller,” this essay integrates theoretical grounding in the phenomenology of flight (speed, distance, time, and perspective), the legacy of Romantic landscape meditation in contemporary poetry and the evolution of the literature of flight, and relevant historical background about the development of commercial air travel. The passenger's view in the period when flight was no longer thrilling and not yet tedious is a peculiarly apt trope for the difficulties of imagining the global and of registering the conundrum of globalization—in its most basic sense, time-space compression—from its repercussions in our private lives to the greatest humanitarian challenges of our time.

Many scholars know lola ridge (1873–1941) as a passionate, irish-born american poet and activist whose poetry was of-ten tied to American subjects, employed various traditional and avant-garde styles, invited a diverse readership, and “expressed a fiery awareness of social injustice” (Kay Boyle [McAlmon 15]). Her time as magazine editor, however, continues to be overlooked. In 1912 Ridge founded the Ferrer Association's journal Modern School and edited its first issue (Avrich 166). The periodical started as a radical, politically based newsletter for parents but soon became less political, publishing artistic and literary work by students of the association's school. Between late 1918 and early 1919, Ridge oversaw, along with several other associate editors, three issues of the avant-garde poetry journal Others. Ridge also organized the Others Lecture Bureau, which toured parts of the Midwest and hosted several literary parties for magazine contributors and supporters (Churchill 58). Ridge's leading editorial role occurred from February 1922 to April 1923, when she served as the American literary editor of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts. Broom was an elaborate magazine praised by many, including William Carlos Williams, who exclaimed, “What a magazine that was! Too expensive for its time but superb to hold in the hand and to read” (187). Although publications that discuss Broom largely marginalize Ridge, the correspondence between her and Broom‘s expatriate editor and publisher, Harold Loeb, in files in Princeton's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections labeled “Broom Correspondence of Harold Loeb, 1920–1956,” shows that from the New York office Ridge orchestrated the magazine's recovery, making it one of the most widely circulated privately owned literary magazines of its time. She also created the magazine's standout “all-American” issue, which pushed against European influences and presented modernism as an American project in its own right. Ridge's pivotal role at Broom is noteworthy because the disagreements she had with Loeb highlight prescribed roles female editors encountered, polarize the modernist debates on both sides of the Atlantic, show her confronting one of modernism's well-known artists, and demonstrate how the fallout over the American issue irrevocably affected Broom‘s future.

When diane middlebrook began the research for her biography of anne sexton (1928–74), she interviewed maxine kumin twice. Kumin and Sexton had been great friends and collaborators, and Kumin wrote the introduction to Sexton's Complete Poems (1981). The excerpt below is based on Middlebrook's typed transcript of a recording of a conversation that took place in Kumin's home on 9 October 1980. I abridged the transcript and submitted it to Kumin for her approval. The ellipses are part of the transcript, but the bracketed interpolations are mine. The complete interviews Middlebrook conducted for Anne Sexton: A Biography will be deposited in the Feminist Theory Archives of the Pembroke Center at Brown University.

Everyone has an interest in time, but historians are interested in it professionally. they have been remarkably fecund in devising ways to carve up and label the mysterious workings of time. They have named it after rulers or other leaders (what the great French historian of the Annales school Marc Bloch referred to tartly as “stumbling from reign to reign” [177]), so that students encounter periods called the Napoleonic, Jacksonian, Victorian, Meiji, and Wilhelmine, to give just a few examples from the nineteenth century I know best. Then there are the centuries, the building blocks of so many survey courses and textbooks that one can only wonder at the powerful hold of the decimal system on the historical imagination. Not least, of course, we find history divided into conceptual units. These may be variations on ancient and modern; they may be periods defined by a body of ideas and practices (Renaissance, Enlightenment) or by overarching political and social developments (the revolutionary era, the age of empire). Once we enter the terrain of conceptually defined eras, titles given by historians are limited only by the number of abstract nouns that can be employed after the phrase “age of,” starting with “anxiety” and continuing through the alphabet.

In her introduction to the english institute's e-book on periodization, the editor, virginia jackson, remarks on the ability of its “digital format” to invite innovative ways of interacting with texts. Marshall Brown's article in the book, for example, allows readers to hear Joseph Haydn's music while they read nineteenth-century literature, giving them an immediate understanding of the musical metaphors Brown uses for describing literary history. Our contemporary presence and capabilities in the digital world, Brown suggests, may help us to understand periods as “linked episodes within the rolling flood of time,” enabling what Jackson describes as “a literary historical process” that “is not progress but wave, not transcendence” but, as Brown writes, “the metrics and bar lines shaping the pulse of history'” (Jackson, par. 4). The authors of On Periodization suggest a practice of periodization that allows for simultaneities: “a new plane of historicity on which several temporalities unfold at once” (Jackson, par. 4). This conception of time is made possible by the present moment, the (relatively) new technologies we have in our midst, through which this e-book is expressed. This “new plane” of simultaneities reflects the primacy of the present in that the technologies we use are actively shaping how we experience literature and literary history (Martin 153–56). Furthermore, while chronological periodization can dis-embed events from their places, our process of reading rhizomically in the digital world may move us to reconsider the primacy of place.

When i agreed to contribute to this issue, i wanted to focus a debate about periodization for once solely on foreign languages and not, as is usually the case, on a single foreign language in comparison with English. To do this, I intended to take a new look at one of the most successful examples of the new periodization: the long eighteenth century. The concept first came to the fore and gained wide critical currency in English studies and in history. In these fields, a number of differently long eighteenth centuries have been proposed and practiced—an eighteenth century that begins as early as 1660, for example, and one that ends as late as 1832. Among the many consequences of the various choices of chronological limits for the long eighteenth century, probably the most significant is the way in which the Enlightenment's role is heightened or diminished in each version of the period. Since in intellectual and literary terms the Enlightenment's impact was felt all over western Europe in the 1700s, I decided that this should be one issue of periodization whose presence would be by now visible in most if not all modern foreign languages. As it turned out, I could not have been more wrong. And what I learned on the way to that realization caused me to shift course radically.

The unevenness of periodization across different national traditions provides the perfect opportunity for a comparative and transnational inquiry. While the initial temptation is to deem literatures demarcated by national tradition incommensurate or simply to juxtapose them as disparate objects, the more compelling project, particularly for the early modern period, is to show how literary periodization itself becomes part of the project of national distinction. In this essay, which I want to place in dialogue with Margaret Greer's and Alison Weber's contributions to PMLA's January 2011 “Theories and Methodologies” forum on the Spanish Golden Age, I argue that periodization must be considered in a transnational framework, for our conception of significant literary epochs is closely tied to the relative value that literatures are assigned, especially when national traditions are coalescing.

Anyone in literary studies who has looked recently at titles of books, conferences, research clusters, and even syllabi across the field cannot have missed two key words, borrowed from historical studies, that are doing substantial periodizing duty for literary and cultural criticism: one a chronological unit, the longue durée, and the other nominally a geographic unit, the Atlantic world. While it may not be obvious, each of these terms has spatial as well as temporal dimensions that reflect their shared origins with Ferdinand Braudel. Braudel first developed an application of the concept of the longue durée (pioneered by Marc Bloch) during the 1940s when, as a German prisoner of war, he wrote the initial draft of his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; later, in 1958, he published his famous conceptual piece on the longue durée in Annales. Braudel posits that time moves at different speeds, defined as geographic, social, and individual, each corresponding to a different durée (literally, a duration of time). The longue durée (usually translated as “long perspective” or “long term”) is the slowest-moving, operating on the scale of centuries, in which historical changes are humanly imperceptible. Braudel's Mediterranean constructs a geography commensurate with his theory of time, the methodological and conceptual frameworks of his book-its geohistorical plan, its comparative approach, its macrohistorical, multidimensional perspective, shifting from the longue durée to the courte durée of political events, embodied in its tripartite division into structures, conjunctures, and events, each section proposing a different mode of periodization and time scale. Braudel's Mediterranean thus consists spatially of multiple seas unfolding temporally over the longue durée and as such simultaneously provides literary studies with a flexible tool for revisionist periodization and Atlantic studies, both historical and literary, with the powerful model of a region as a unit of geographic and chronological analysis.

My substitution in the hoary formulation what was x? must seem perverse. isn't latino literature in the united states a newcomer among subfields—a recent entry on the roster of MLA book prizes, a fast-growing site of knowledge production, faculty lines, and institutional visibility? How could that field of the future—propelled by a demographic surge—be already a thing of the past? It is to worry this commonsensical temporality of Latino issues that I invoke the title of Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature?, published in early 2011. In a neat coincidence, Warren's book was published in the same season as the first-ever Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (NALL), a project spearheaded by Ilan Stavans with the collaboration of five editors. Both publishing events sparked discussion beyond the academy among the shrinking general audience interested in literary culture; taken together, they illustrate the peculiar exigencies of periodizing ethnic literatures.

After being exiled from nazi germany and completing the extraordinary mimesis in istanbul in 1946, erich auerbach wrote from Princeton University in 1952, “Literary criticism now participates in a practical seminar on world history. … Our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation.” Auerbach, who must be reckoned one of the great synthesists and literary historians of the twentieth century, was expressing a sentiment that will be familiar to anyone who has thought about world literature from a postcolonial perspective. While postcolonial literary studies may have helped define the parameters of the practical seminar on world history, its full implications are still somewhat obscured by the arguments about periodicity that are often taken as a terminological necessity in applications of the term postcolonial. This is the burden imposed by the temporalizing post-. However, closer scrutiny of the postcolonial suggests that it contains mutually reinforcing periodizing and spatial functions. Many of the most common ideas that circulate in the field, such as colonial encounter, neocolonialism, nationalism and postnationalism, hegemony, transnationalism, diasporas, and globalization, are organized around often unacknowledged spatial motifs. The concept of space that implicitly structures usages of postcolonialism is far from inert: there is an active dimension of spatializing in them that helps shape the field's distinctiveness. This is because even when the term is deployed exclusively for periodizing purposes, as in showing that the medieval period or Russia today is amenable to a postcolonial analysis, the nature of what is highlighted insistently invokes spatial practices. Once the spatial logic of postcolonialism is brought to the foreground, the complexity of its critical diagnostic as applied in the practical seminar on world history becomes clearer.

When we read (analytically or in search of pleasure), we read in the present tense. indeed, the text seems not only present to us but electrically charged. It can seem to envelop us or to be ingested and internalized by us; it can get under our skin, startle us, make us cry, inhibit sleep (Miller, ch. 5 [146–91]). In memory the text may retain much of this experienced vividness and presence, even if our circumstances of reading can only be reconstructed laboriously. The context generally remains secondary to the felt memory of reading as visceral experience.

During its 2008 annual meeting at mla headquarters, the committee on the literatures of people of color in the united states and Canada (CLPC) took up the question of archival work in the study of ethnic literatures. After much discussion of the various ways ethnic literatures are rendered “illiterate” or unreadable, the CLPC proposed a session titled “Practices of the Ethnic Archive” for the 2009 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. That session revealed, and for some of us confirmed, that scholarly discourse on the archive continues, for the most part, to ignore the ethnic archive as distinct from its white, European counterpart. Four of the five essays included here (Carr, Cruz, Kaufman, and Washburn) grew from the conversation the session engendered; the PMLA editorial board invited Nicolás Kanellos, founder and director of the project Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, to participate in the discussion as well. We are grateful to the contributors for their insights about what the ethnic archive reveals and about the unintended consequences of applying to its holdings the theoretical practices informing archival studies writ large.