For thirty years the scholarly consensus has been that John Milton was an iconoclast, an idol breaker. I argue that instead of destroying idols, Milton's poems capture and preserve them under judgment. By investing captured idols with poetic care even as he hollows them out from the inside, Milton refashions them as the instruments of their own disenchantment. This alternative response resembles what the theorist Bruno Latour calls “iconoclash.” Even Eikonoklastes, which Milton wrote in refutation of Charles I's Eikon Basilike, is not an iconoclastic tract. I suggest that his late poems gain much of their aesthetic power from the idols they preserve, through a kind of Lucretian experience that I call the “idolatrous sublime.”

Michael Jackson, arguably the most notable popular-culture virtuoso of the late twentieth century, cannot be understood outside the economic moment that produced him. This essay examines relations between his virtuosity as a dancer and the trajectory of American deindustrialization in the period 1983–88. Through the trope of the human motor, Jackson's virtuosity produces nostalgia for a vanishing industrial past, while barely containing the contradictions and exclusions endemic to the industrial modernist project, especially those involving race. This trope is activated by the intersection of his movement vocabulary and his recurring invocations of hard work. Jackson's dancing in this period reveals a neglected aspect of virtuosity in dance more generally. As an allegorical presentation of idealized relations between the body and work abandoned by the relentless motility of capital, Jackson's virtuosity allows audiences to view these disappearing modes with a romantic backward glance.

James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) might be the best-known literary product of Agee's uneven career and of Time Inc.‘s golden days at the top of periodical culture. This convergence of author, institution, and text presents a case study for two undertheorized aspects of mid-century American literary history: how the rise of American media corporations, of which Time Inc. is the most successful, provides economic patronage and massive readerships for a generation of writers raised on the tenets of literary modernism and how the “corporate voice” and collective editorial model at these institutions alter conceptions of authorial production. This essay tracks how competing definitions of writing as work—either “for oneself” or “on the clock”—emerge from the context of institutional affiliation. It then shows how the epistemological question of writing as work can be read into the “mental discipline” of Time Inc. magazines’ corporate style (referred to as Time style) and into the recursive elision of authorial control in Famous Men.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's closely related critiques of language, Cartesian skepticism, inner criteria, and hermeneutics have instructive parallels in the work of Samuel Beckett, whose avowed interest in Wittgenstein's philosophy elucidates, for example, the treatment of expectation in Waiting for Godot, of solipsism in Company, and of rule following in Endgame and What Where. Wittgenstein's insistence that interpretation is not compulsory but remedial, resting on a primitive rule-following competence that permeates our “forms of life” and thus our language, endorses the antimetaphysical dramaturgy Beckett developed while directing stage and screen productions of his own writing. Adapting Wittgenstein's concept of “family resemblance” to an exemplary conjunction of philosophy and literature, this essay proposes that Beckett's works are less aporetic scenarios of deferral and undecidability than meticulous representations of the largely unarticulated convergent behaviors constituting forms of life. As a director, Beckett could draw from Wittgenstein clarifying confirmation of an aesthetic practice that, like the Philosophical Investigations, begins “where interpretation comes to an end.”

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 situates the problem of twenty-first-century work in the global South—specifically, in South Africa—to challenge northern theories of the crisis of work. Addressing the break between Fordism and post-Fordism peculiar to the postcolonial context, it argues that new regimes of work should be understood in relation both to longer histories of colonial resistance to proletarianization (to the racisms of the shop floor) and to colonial Fordisms, as well as to the way these two factors inform the current expansion of informal employment. What practices and forms of life emerge from the precarity of informal economies and informal settlements? How are precarious modes of life connected to and informed by the steady dematerialization of the economy through financialization?

Waste has been a recognizable socioeconomic problem since at least the late Middle Ages. In England, because of land and labor shortages, wars, famines, and especially changes in legal and penitential discourses, waste became, by the mid–fourteenth century, a critical concept. But a fully fleshed-out vocabulary for thinking through the meaning and consequences of the practice of committing waste does not yet exist. This essay argues that two fourteenth-century poems, Wynnere and Wastoure and Piers Plowman, address the lack of such a thinking through, tackling the problem of waste in all its vicissitudes. They deploy the formal resources of poetic language—from personification to episodic structure—to draw together the various ideas of waste from other discourses and to raise medieval readers' consciousnesses about the seriousness of waste's consequences. The essay calls their use of formal resources in creating this critical discourse a “poetics of waste.”

Cultural theorists interrogating the appropriation of 9/11 through nationalist, capitalist, and media forces have tended to deauthorize the general public's embodied and affective responses to that event. Instead of disavowing claims of mourning unsupported by geographic proximity or material connection, this essay situates such responses in contemporary screen culture to consider how the shifting grounds of materiality complicate the experience of bodily location at every level from the perceptual to the political. Using photographs, fiction, museum exhibits, and survivor accounts, the essay explores how the transformed relation between subjects and objects defines our apprehension of 9/11 in material, technological, and phenomenological terms. The complex dynamics of perception and embodiment unveiled through these representations suggest the need to rethink categories of experience and affect to accommodate new paradigms of proximity and connectedness increasingly liberated from the measures of geography and the borders of the body.

Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, the fictional autobiography of an incestuous SS officer, is one of the most controversial novels published in the last decade: it received two prestigious French literary awards but was denounced as kitschy, pornographic, and revisionist. This essay explores the intertext of the Oresteia, which makes the book more complex than most critics have acknowledged. The references to Aeschylus permit the narrator to style himself a tragic hero and thereby to trivialize the Nazi crimes. At the same time, the mythical emplotment, together with other intertexts, indicates that Aue's account is a concoction. Far from simply propagating a revisionist ideology, Les Bienveillantes combines much factual information with a high degree of reflexivity, provoking readers to ponder the Shoah and how to do justice to it.

Climate change, I argue, is a catastrophe that resists the revelation promised by apocalyptic narrative. My case study is William Cowper's poem The Task (1785), which I situate in two climatic contexts: the year of its composition, which saw meteorological extremes caused by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, and an era of geologic modernity, the Anthropocene, which commenced with the industrial combustion of fossil fuels in the late eighteenth century. As volcanogenic haze migrates in Cowper's descriptions from the countryside to the greenhouse and the imperial city, the poet fails to identify a meteorology with which to distinguish nature's seasonal “revolvency” from eschatological presages or from the modernization process itself—the historical “revolution” embodied by worsening urban pollution. Climate change poses a crisis, in the dual etymological senses of a decision and a turning point, because it unsettles the duration of the present, what returns and endures and so measures alteration.

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.

Perplexity has often greeted hannah arendt's decision to place an extended historical reflection on anti-Semitism at the beginning of The Origins of Totalitarianism, her doleful 1951 postmortem chronicling Europe's twentieth-century descent into the abyss. Seyla Benhabib proposes that to “appreciate the unity of the work as Arendt herself intended it to be read” (64), one must begin not with part 1 (“Antisemitism”) but rather with the chapter in part 3 (“Totalitarianism”) about the extermination and concentration camps. Another of Arendt's best commentators, Margaret Canovan, observes that Arendt's arrangement is “not a very helpful one” because, among other reasons, Arendt's discussion of anti-Semitism deploys key concepts like “imperialism” whose particular meanings to Arendt are only later defined. Canovan chalks up Arendt's organizational decision to “her own initial preoccupation” with anti-Semitism, as well as to “reasons of chronology” (28-29).