Jesse Zuba
Professor of English at Delaware State University and author of /The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America/, /American Religious Poems/, /New York/, and articles on John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Yusef Komunyakaa, Raymond Carver, and Wallace Stevens.
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Books by Jesse Zuba
Zuba investigates poets’ diverse responses to the question of beginning a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. He shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson’s /The Arrivistes/ to Ken Chen’s /Juvenilia/ stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for development even as it averts that demand.
Combining literary analysis with cultural history, /The First Book/ will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.
From the Back Cover:
"A fascinating story of poetic debuts. With nuanced understanding as well as clear-eyed realism, Jesse Zuba traces the self-fashioning that goes into the making of careers, allowing poets to strike a delicate balance between institutional demands and personal aspirations."--Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
“Exploring the professionalization of poetic culture over the last hundred years, /The First Book/ represents a confluence of often mutually exclusive kinds of excellence: Zuba is at once an adept close reader of poems, a scrupulous literary historian, a curator of cultures popular and unpopular, and synthesizer of sophisticated critical thinking. Even more rarely, Zuba writes with a quietly stylistic panache that makes /The First Book/ an uncommon pleasure to read.”—James Longenbach, University of Rochester
“/The First Book/ combines social theory, cultural and publishing history, and close attention to individual poems to argue that notions of the poet’s career, or the poet’s profession, have shaped poems, books, and poetic oeuvres in the American twentieth century in ways that prior critics have not seen. Zuba’s claims are true, new, and important.”—Stephen Burt, Harvard University
Drafts by Jesse Zuba
I test this hypothesis through a reading of Yusef Komunyakaa’s early poetry, which demonstrates the usefulness of lyric to the pedagogy of cultural criminology, particularly in the way that it explores personhood in its precarious subjection to the dominant cultural discourses as well as in its capacity for agency, understanding, and empathy. The poems illuminate the dynamic, fiercely emotional notion of subjectivity that lies at the heart of the field. In doing so, they show that lyric poems are likely to prove just as useful as narrative texts to the study of cultural criminology, as well as to any enterprise that values understanding the lived experience of persons in its full complexity and intensity.
Talks by Jesse Zuba
Tracing “Oscar’s progression from inauthentic diasporic male to an assimilated, unsentimental un-virgin” (Machado Saez 538), Junot Diaz’s novel seems to exemplify the logic of the student-centered college novel as a bildungsroman focusing on the growth of a “character who must in the end be allowed to escape [the university’s] gravitational pull” (Connor 69-70). The novel is academic through and through: littered with footnotes based on research in an archive of Oscar’s unpublished papers, the novel is narrated by Yunior, who rooms with Oscar at Rutgers University and later teaches “composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College” (Diaz 326). Nicknamed “Mr. Collegeboy” while still in high school, Oscar dreams of finding among the “thousands of young people” at Rutgers “someone like him” (Diaz 49). And yet the criticism devoted to the novel fails to register its obsession with academe. I argue that this failure sheds light on the limitations of canonical academic fiction, which tends to privilege a picture of the school as a place of poignant transformation for students and professors alike.
Though Rutgers serves as the setting for nearly half of the novel, the reader encounters not a single professor or college classroom, and virtually all of the topoi of academic fiction – from frat parties and parent visits to sex scandals and committee meetings – are absent. Extracurricular attempts to educate Oscar – most notably Yunior’s attempt to “fix [his] life” (Diaz 175) – not only fail, but leave little potential for redemptive rebellion, and Oscar moves back home after graduation to teach at his old high school, where he’s just as miserable as he was when he left it. Insisting that the book is nothing if not a college novel, I suggest that Oscar’s conspicuously static selfhood challenges the image that pervades canonical academic fiction of the university as a “closed world” (Connor 69) enfolding a uniquely defined “university community” with its own “quirky, pedantic, vengeful, legalistic, and inhumane” (Showalter 119) means of producing change.
Works Cited
Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History, 1950-1995. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007.
Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
From Firstborn to Vita Nova: Louise Glück’s Born-Again Professionalism
In “The Education of the Poet” Louise Glück critiques the notion that “creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition” and instead evokes the writing life in terms that recall the Puritan idea of vocation. According to that idea, the individual is unable to will salvation and so seeks “signs of election” through labor in a calling (Weber 79). As a result, the career is defined by a persistent crisis produced by the tension between the craving for successes that signal assurance of election and the knowledge that such assurance can never be complete. This crisis is both amplified and complicated in the field of poetry, which can be viewed, according to Pierre Bourdieu, as a “game of ‘loser wins’” (39) in which authority and prestige are inversely related to conventional forms of success. How does Glück come by her self-avowed “powerful sense of vocation” (108) if she can neither will the demonstration of her poetic gifts nor take publications, profits, or honors as trustworthy signs of election?
This paper argues that Glück’s work is representative of a post-1945 American literary culture largely defined by a sense of vocational crisis that demands to be understood in the context of Protestant theology and, more specifically, the notion of the calling, which serves as a foundation for the ideology of professionalism. I show how that crisis registers in Glück’s career as a tendency to return repeatedly to the stance of the beginner. While her poetic rebirths accommodate the professional imperative for rationalized development insofar as they project a course of steady growth, they also reflect the indeterminacy of a vocational path governed by the doctrine of election through grace alone. I use close readings of the lead-off poems in each of Glück’s collections from Firstborn (1968) to Vita Nova (2001) to suggest that this practice of authorization via serial re-initiation defines a complex response to an increasingly professionalized contemporary poetry scene deeply rooted in America’s Protestant past.
Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randall Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print.
Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994. Print.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism. Ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
Syllabi by Jesse Zuba
Zuba investigates poets’ diverse responses to the question of beginning a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. He shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson’s /The Arrivistes/ to Ken Chen’s /Juvenilia/ stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for development even as it averts that demand.
Combining literary analysis with cultural history, /The First Book/ will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.
From the Back Cover:
"A fascinating story of poetic debuts. With nuanced understanding as well as clear-eyed realism, Jesse Zuba traces the self-fashioning that goes into the making of careers, allowing poets to strike a delicate balance between institutional demands and personal aspirations."--Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
“Exploring the professionalization of poetic culture over the last hundred years, /The First Book/ represents a confluence of often mutually exclusive kinds of excellence: Zuba is at once an adept close reader of poems, a scrupulous literary historian, a curator of cultures popular and unpopular, and synthesizer of sophisticated critical thinking. Even more rarely, Zuba writes with a quietly stylistic panache that makes /The First Book/ an uncommon pleasure to read.”—James Longenbach, University of Rochester
“/The First Book/ combines social theory, cultural and publishing history, and close attention to individual poems to argue that notions of the poet’s career, or the poet’s profession, have shaped poems, books, and poetic oeuvres in the American twentieth century in ways that prior critics have not seen. Zuba’s claims are true, new, and important.”—Stephen Burt, Harvard University
I test this hypothesis through a reading of Yusef Komunyakaa’s early poetry, which demonstrates the usefulness of lyric to the pedagogy of cultural criminology, particularly in the way that it explores personhood in its precarious subjection to the dominant cultural discourses as well as in its capacity for agency, understanding, and empathy. The poems illuminate the dynamic, fiercely emotional notion of subjectivity that lies at the heart of the field. In doing so, they show that lyric poems are likely to prove just as useful as narrative texts to the study of cultural criminology, as well as to any enterprise that values understanding the lived experience of persons in its full complexity and intensity.
Tracing “Oscar’s progression from inauthentic diasporic male to an assimilated, unsentimental un-virgin” (Machado Saez 538), Junot Diaz’s novel seems to exemplify the logic of the student-centered college novel as a bildungsroman focusing on the growth of a “character who must in the end be allowed to escape [the university’s] gravitational pull” (Connor 69-70). The novel is academic through and through: littered with footnotes based on research in an archive of Oscar’s unpublished papers, the novel is narrated by Yunior, who rooms with Oscar at Rutgers University and later teaches “composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College” (Diaz 326). Nicknamed “Mr. Collegeboy” while still in high school, Oscar dreams of finding among the “thousands of young people” at Rutgers “someone like him” (Diaz 49). And yet the criticism devoted to the novel fails to register its obsession with academe. I argue that this failure sheds light on the limitations of canonical academic fiction, which tends to privilege a picture of the school as a place of poignant transformation for students and professors alike.
Though Rutgers serves as the setting for nearly half of the novel, the reader encounters not a single professor or college classroom, and virtually all of the topoi of academic fiction – from frat parties and parent visits to sex scandals and committee meetings – are absent. Extracurricular attempts to educate Oscar – most notably Yunior’s attempt to “fix [his] life” (Diaz 175) – not only fail, but leave little potential for redemptive rebellion, and Oscar moves back home after graduation to teach at his old high school, where he’s just as miserable as he was when he left it. Insisting that the book is nothing if not a college novel, I suggest that Oscar’s conspicuously static selfhood challenges the image that pervades canonical academic fiction of the university as a “closed world” (Connor 69) enfolding a uniquely defined “university community” with its own “quirky, pedantic, vengeful, legalistic, and inhumane” (Showalter 119) means of producing change.
Works Cited
Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History, 1950-1995. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007.
Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
From Firstborn to Vita Nova: Louise Glück’s Born-Again Professionalism
In “The Education of the Poet” Louise Glück critiques the notion that “creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition” and instead evokes the writing life in terms that recall the Puritan idea of vocation. According to that idea, the individual is unable to will salvation and so seeks “signs of election” through labor in a calling (Weber 79). As a result, the career is defined by a persistent crisis produced by the tension between the craving for successes that signal assurance of election and the knowledge that such assurance can never be complete. This crisis is both amplified and complicated in the field of poetry, which can be viewed, according to Pierre Bourdieu, as a “game of ‘loser wins’” (39) in which authority and prestige are inversely related to conventional forms of success. How does Glück come by her self-avowed “powerful sense of vocation” (108) if she can neither will the demonstration of her poetic gifts nor take publications, profits, or honors as trustworthy signs of election?
This paper argues that Glück’s work is representative of a post-1945 American literary culture largely defined by a sense of vocational crisis that demands to be understood in the context of Protestant theology and, more specifically, the notion of the calling, which serves as a foundation for the ideology of professionalism. I show how that crisis registers in Glück’s career as a tendency to return repeatedly to the stance of the beginner. While her poetic rebirths accommodate the professional imperative for rationalized development insofar as they project a course of steady growth, they also reflect the indeterminacy of a vocational path governed by the doctrine of election through grace alone. I use close readings of the lead-off poems in each of Glück’s collections from Firstborn (1968) to Vita Nova (2001) to suggest that this practice of authorization via serial re-initiation defines a complex response to an increasingly professionalized contemporary poetry scene deeply rooted in America’s Protestant past.
Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randall Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print.
Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994. Print.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism. Ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.