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City University of New York (CUNY)

Modernism

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English Language and Literature

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Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton May 2021

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …


Harlem And Abroad: Notes To An International 'Renaissance', Joshua I. Cohen Sep 2019

Harlem And Abroad: Notes To An International 'Renaissance', Joshua I. Cohen

Publications and Research

Like other intractable figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement’s visual artists sometimes exceeded their expected parameters, and thus their anticipated representativeness of a locality. Their images, in other words, did not automatically disclose Harlem-bound or even US-bound concerns. Now familiar through continual reproduction in exhibition catalogues, scholarly monographs and literary compendia, certain artworks from the period – such as Archibald J. Motley’s Blues (1929; Figure 1) and Aaron Douglas’s Congo (c. 1928; Figure 2) – subverted any definition of the Harlem Renaissance that would hinge on a narrowly delimited urban geography or national imaginary. Motley, who painted ‘Blues’ during …


T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars Of Wisdom And The Erotics Of Literary History: Straddling Epic., Václav Paris Jan 2017

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars Of Wisdom And The Erotics Of Literary History: Straddling Epic., Václav Paris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Breaking And Entering: An Italian American's Literary Odyssey, Fred L. Gardaphé Sep 1995

Breaking And Entering: An Italian American's Literary Odyssey, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

In this personalized account, Gardaphe presents audiences with his own-first person story of the meaning of ethnic identity in America. Gardaphe relates his story of how his own adventures, on the streets of Chicago and in the libraries and school, shaped his views on becoming an intellectual and fashioned his career as a writer and professor of Italian American culture.