Jerry Ward's Blogspot

Rereading Eudora Welty's The Ponder Heart Eudora Welty's novella The Ponder Heart (1953) is a comic masterpiece, a gem of heritage and observational comedy.   The comedy imprisoned in the text is pathological and ,thus,   deliciously Mississippi, Southern, and American.   Like many writers of her gender and class, the accomplished   white women writers of the 1950s, Welty seems to have possessed (and to have been   possessed by) a wicked sense of white humor.   From various perspectives available to us in 2019   --   many of them having origins in African American praxis, and especially in any sustained attention to Edna Earle, the first person narrator of the novella, we discern how the power of the grotesque and the stereotype is undiminished in our contemporary negotiations with text and time. Indeed, recent discussion of ANT (actor-network theory) reminds us that reflection on what we are doing in the act of reading can be fresh and...

John O'Neal (1940-2019)/memory notes Departed spirits, who are eternally with us, demand that I make a ritual of condolence.   I obey. John O'Neal --------Resolute, idealistic but fearful, and philosophical, he came to Tougaloo College in 1962 along with other civil rights workers and created there a meaningful segment of history/narrative. A proud member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, he stayed with us from time to time when he wasn't somewhere else in Mississippi, demonstrating with SNCC workers for the cause of freedom.   He participated in our modest dramatic activities in Ballard Hall, our theater, and in Ernst Borinski's famed Social Science Forums in the lab (basement of Beard Hall), and talked. We thought him to be most articulate, a role model of intelligence from the North.   We were impressed that he had earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy, that he was putting what he had learned to practical use.   He talked and talk...

The Writer/The Publisher/The American Creed "These are critical days when, more than ever, men seem to become captives of their personal ambition for wealth, social position and influence, and when their adventures in power politics and in finance politics, both at home and in the international field, also make them captives."   Pat Jackson, c. 1940, quoted by Murray Kempton in Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955). In 2019, everywhere, the writer is free,   and everywhere, the writer is in chains.   So too is the publisher, although the self-publisher may be an exception; the final objective of the publisher is profit.   Both the writer and the publisher genuflect, in different degrees, before the American Creed   ---   a principle abstracted from the American/Racial   Contract.   Everywhere in what we misapprehend as reality, we discover implacable chaos. Thus, tim...

IDENTITY In   just   ice I dwell.   Pure. Cold. Citizen in Dante's inferno, perhaps I think. Maybe I am not what I think I am.   But dead I never know a lie from a truth.   Oh, hell, so what?   I am in just ice and caught you neatly in my trap. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             February 12, 2019

Price of the Ticket/Cost of the Prize "On December 9, 2018, I received the New Academy Prize for Literature in Stockholm, Sweden, the award set up last year to replace the Nobel Prize, which was cancelled after a scandal and dispute at the Swedish Academy. Maryse Cond é , "Giving Voice to Guadeloupe" Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir .   New York: Scribner, 2018. You   imagine that setting the opening sentence of an acceptance speech by Cond é in proximity with a bibliographic citation for Laymon's memoir, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence (2019) from the American Library Association is a meaningful gesture.   A gesture can have meaning without being especially meaningful. It can mean simply that you made a gesture. It can mean, truth be told, that you are pleased a larger world of readers acknowledged the merits of work by the two writers.   It does not mean you regard the awards as more than confetti in a parade th...

JUST   READING As Rita Felski (University of Virginia) notes in her syllabus for ENCR 3400: Theories of Reading, Spring 2019, many "everyday experiences of reading…are either ignored or treated with suspicion in literary theory.   Felski is introducing undergraduates to critical (theory-based) and post-critical (experience-based) reading.   Why experience should be identified as post-critical is subject to question.   Unless logic fails us in 2019, it is logical to assume experiences of one sort or another are prior to the construction of theories.   Perhaps Felski invokes the critical/post-critical binary to suggest her pedagogy is more orthodox than radical, that in her classroom what ought to be said coldly to literary theory will not be voiced:   Um Himmels willen, ficken Sie sich selbst .   Felski, who succeeded Ralph Cohen as editor of New Literary History , perhaps remembers one of his rules:   a proper scholar/critic speaks to col...

FRISSON (for Walter Liniger) Each Alpine snowflake falling assaults memory   --- your eyes obliged to see in every mirror, however Swiss, James "Son" Thomas, who one night anatomized your soul (so you confessed in an afternoon of profoundest truth), and the pain you fled in unfettered alarm as a blues became a jazz, as an agony became a balm. Yes, in these   late years memory assaults our youth (words between us in music, in air); each Alpine snowflake falling is gravitas pulling us, eyes and all, into the mirror of no return to sweat an eternity once our blues is our jazz, our agony, forever our balm. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             February 8, 2019