Category Archives: Olney, James

Afro-American Culture, Literature, and Social Order, Part 2 of 6; Commentary on The Black Huddle

Houston Baker, Blyden Jackson, James Olney, and John Sekora discuss the major themes and aesthetic concerns that unify and divide black writers, and the effects of the emergence of African-American studies on both the academy and society as a whole. … Continue reading

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Afro-American Culture, Literature, and Social Order, Part 1 of 6

Houston Baker, Blyden Jackson, James Olney, and John Sekora examine the status of African-American writing and literature in the mid-1980s and discuss changes in awareness of black writing to academic and popular audiences. They note increasing interest in and knowledge of … Continue reading

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Cultural and Aesthetic Modernism, Part 4 of 5

Harvey Gross, Diane Leonard, Steven Marcus, and James Olney discuss how best to measure the cultural and aesthetic health of a society, whether great art can be consistently equated with great social institutions, and some of the criteria against which … Continue reading

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Cultural and Aesthetic Modernism, Part 3 of 5

Harvey Gross, Diane Leonard, Steven Marcus, and James Olney discuss the importance of social, artistic, and political criticism to the rise of modernism in the twentieth century. At the time of this interview, Gross, a Fellow at the National Humanities Center … Continue reading

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Cultural and Aesthetic Modernism, Part 2 of 5

Harvey Gross, Diane Leonard, Steven Marcus, James Olney, and Kejia Yuan describe how modern politics, literature, and the arts are affected by questions of belief, either artistic or religious. At the time of this interview, Gross, a Fellow at the National … Continue reading

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Cultural and Aesthetic Modernism, Part 1 of 5

Harvey Gross, Diane Leonard, Steven Marcus, James Olney, and Kejia Yuan define and debate the meanings of modernism and the modern from the standpoints of literature, philosophy, and criticism. At the time of this interview, Gross, a Fellow at the … Continue reading

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Public and Private Faces: Robert Frost and Mark Twain

In this conversation, James Cox reflects on the public images of iconic authors such as Mark Twain and Robert Frost, and shares a few favorite lines from Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” James Olney discusses the roles of hypocrisy and … Continue reading

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Biography and Autobiography

James Olney and John Unterecker discuss biography and autobiography in poetry and fiction. Unterecker sees biography and autobiography as inextricable while Olney views the two forms as profoundly different acts. The scholars agree, however, that despite a biographer’s desire to … Continue reading

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