Clare Cavanagh
Biographic Data
| ID | 3595730 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Clare Cavanagh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Clare |
| FAMILY NAME | Cavanagh |
| SIGNATURE | CAVANAGH C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
“Try to praise the mutilated world”
Adam Zagajewski’s poem addresses history’s victims only obliquely, through its refugees and abandoned homesteads. Lyric history, as Zagajewski envisions it, retains its humanity through its specificity and thus remains habitable and human in spite of the endless exiles and executioners. As throughout Zagajewski’s writing, the natural world is steeped in human history, and though he makes no explicit mention of it, this history is clearly informed…
The Spirit of the Age
None of the stereotypes of Victorian England—narrow-minded, inhibited, moralistic, complacent—prepares us for the vitality, variety, and above all extraordinary quality of intellectual life displayed in this volume of essays. Selected and annotated by Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian of Victorian thought, the writings address a wide range of subjects—religion, politics, history, science, art, socialism, and feminism—by eminent figur…
Non-strategic” Eastern Europe and the Fate of the Humanities
Until recent events intervened, Eastern European Studies found themselves under attack at my home university and other institutions for being, among other things, “non-strategic.” We see the same notion, if not the same terminology, applied increasingly to the humanities and non-quantitative social sciences, which lose ground daily to the so-called STEM disciplines in both educational policy and practice. How do we defend the study of Eastern Eur…
The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture
The difference between and the confusion of Weltansicht with Weltanschauung is discussed by Underhill (2009 and 2011).Says Underhill: "Weltansicht ... is the patterning of conceptual frameworks and the organisation of ideas which makes up the form of language (in Humboldt's definition of form), the patterning within which we think... Weltanschauung ... is the intellectual refinement and elaboration of those fundamental conceptual frameworks which…
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics explores the intersection of poetry, national life, and national identity in Poland and Russia, from 1917 to the present. As a corrective to recent trends in criticism, acclaimed translator and critic Clare Cavanagh demonstrates how the practice of the personal lyric in totalitarian states such as Russia and Poland did not represent an escapist tendency; rather it reverberated as a bold political statement and at …
Sunrise over Cassis
Sunrise over Cassis* Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh In the semi-darkness white buildings loom, not fully formulated, and beside them, the gray vineyards, the quiet before dawn; Judas counts his silver coins, but olive trees contorted in wild prayer enter the earth ever more deeply. Where is the sun! But it’s still cold and a humble landscape spreads around us; the stars have gone and priests sleep greedily, birds aren’t allowe…
The Majesty of Sleep
The Majesty of Sleep* Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh Sleep like the veranda of a country house spreads before you a forest and shadows and the interior of memories. Sleep is the mind free of constraint, the proud capital of poetry and plays, sleep is a thought not yet embodied, fed meagerly by jealous waking. Sleep is Assyria, severe and valiant. Sleep is Tuscany seen at dawn, when slim trees sip ink from the black earth—and a…
December
December* Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh December, herald of destruction, takes you on a long stroll through the black torsos of trees and leaves scorched in autumn’s fire, as if to say: so much then for your secrets and your treasures, the fervent trill of small birds, the promises of summer months. Your dreams have been dissected, the blackbird’s song now has a rationale, plants’ corpses clutter the herbarium. Only the labor…
Spirit of the Age
Poetry and History
Describing Pictures
Describing Pictures Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh We usually catch just a few details— grapes from the seventeenth century, still gleaming, and perhaps a fine ivory fork, or a cross's wood and drops of blood, and great suffering, which has already dried. The shiny parquet creaks. We're in a strange town— almost always in a strange town. Somewhere a guard stands and yawns. An ash's branch sways outside the window. Describing s…
Postcolonial Poland
Research Article| January 01 2004 Postcolonial Poland Clare Cavanagh Clare Cavanagh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2004) 10 (1): 82–92. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-1-82 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Clare Cavanagh; Postcolonial Poland. Common Knowledge 1 January 2004; 10 (1): 82–92. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-1-82 Download citation file:…
Lyrical Ethics
Art is not life and cannot beA midwife to society.-W. H. Auden, "New Year Letter," 1940What is poetry which does not saveNations or people?-Czeslaw Milosz, "Dedication," 1945If dictators still wishedto read our wrathful, rabid,well-wrought rhymes, then poetrywould surely change the world.-Adam Zagajewski, "Thorns," 1983
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition
The Forms of the Ordinary
I. Forming the Ordinary In Discourse and the Novel (1934-35), Mikhail Bakhtin famously turns lyric poetry into the straight man or fall guy for his properly dialogic hero, prose fiction, or more precisely, the novel. The function of the poet, in Bakhtin's view, is to close up shop on the prose writer's carnival. He is as resolutely single-minded as his lyrics are single-voiced; and he shuns the social uproar and linguistic cacophony that fuel the…
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition
If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an apocalypse of cultural community, then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a yearning for culture, he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and …
View with a Grain of Sand
In these 100 poems Wislawa Szymborska portrays a world of astonishing diversity and richness, in which nature is wise and prodigal and fate unpredictable, if not mischievous. With acute irony tempered by a generous curiosity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty. The ruins of Troy; sunlight gleaming on a pewter jug; birds returning in the spring; the Abominable Snowman lurking in the Himalayas; a body-building contes…
The Death of the Book a la russe
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition
If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an "apocalypse of cultural community," then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a "yearning for world culture," he defined the impulse that charges his own p…
Remembrance and Invention
oetry and memory: the expanse covered in modern Russian history by these two terms is vast indeed. The three articles collected beneath this rubric in the present issue of The Russian Review may serve us, though, as a kind of shorthand guide to the extensive territory that poetic memory has been called upon to span in the Russian literature and culture of this century-from the recuperation of ancient myths by modern poet-dramatists in Silver Age …
Polish Poetry Observed
Pseudo-revolution in Poetic Language
It is important to stress that these peculiar pseudo-revolutions, imported from Russia and carried out under the protection of the army and the police, were full of authentic revolutionary psychology and their adherents experienced them with grand pathos, enthusiasm, and eschatological faith in an absolutely new world. Poets found themselves on the proscenium for the last time. They thought they were playing their customary part in the glorious E…
The Poetics of Jewishness
Substantial Proofs of Being
Synthetic Nationality
A world that is your own must be created for you since the one you inhabit has become foreign to you."Petr Chaadaev, "Second Philosophical Letter"In "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel'shtam" Gregory Freidin writes that "only a cultural orphan growing up in the revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the…
Postcolonial Poland
Research Article| January 01 2004 Postcolonial Poland Clare Cavanagh Clare Cavanagh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2004) 10 (1): 82–92. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-1-82 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Clare Cavanagh; Postcolonial Poland. Common Knowledge 1 January 2004; 10 (1): 82–92. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-1-82 Download citation file:…
The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture
The difference between and the confusion of Weltansicht with Weltanschauung is discussed by Underhill (2009 and 2011).Says Underhill: "Weltansicht ... is the patterning of conceptual frameworks and the organisation of ideas which makes up the form of language (in Humboldt's definition of form), the patterning within which we think... Weltanschauung ... is the intellectual refinement and elaboration of those fundamental conceptual frameworks which…
View with a Grain of Sand
In these 100 poems Wislawa Szymborska portrays a world of astonishing diversity and richness, in which nature is wise and prodigal and fate unpredictable, if not mischievous. With acute irony tempered by a generous curiosity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty. The ruins of Troy; sunlight gleaming on a pewter jug; birds returning in the spring; the Abominable Snowman lurking in the Himalayas; a body-building contes…
The Forms of the Ordinary
I. Forming the Ordinary In Discourse and the Novel (1934-35), Mikhail Bakhtin famously turns lyric poetry into the straight man or fall guy for his properly dialogic hero, prose fiction, or more precisely, the novel. The function of the poet, in Bakhtin's view, is to close up shop on the prose writer's carnival. He is as resolutely single-minded as his lyrics are single-voiced; and he shuns the social uproar and linguistic cacophony that fuel the…
Non-strategic” Eastern Europe and the Fate of the Humanities
Until recent events intervened, Eastern European Studies found themselves under attack at my home university and other institutions for being, among other things, “non-strategic.” We see the same notion, if not the same terminology, applied increasingly to the humanities and non-quantitative social sciences, which lose ground daily to the so-called STEM disciplines in both educational policy and practice. How do we defend the study of Eastern Eur…
Lyrical Ethics
Art is not life and cannot beA midwife to society.-W. H. Auden, "New Year Letter," 1940What is poetry which does not saveNations or people?-Czeslaw Milosz, "Dedication," 1945If dictators still wishedto read our wrathful, rabid,well-wrought rhymes, then poetrywould surely change the world.-Adam Zagajewski, "Thorns," 1983
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition
If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an apocalypse of cultural community, then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a yearning for culture, he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and …
The Death of the Book a la russe
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Poetics of Jewishness
Synthetic Nationality
A world that is your own must be created for you since the one you inhabit has become foreign to you."Petr Chaadaev, "Second Philosophical Letter"In "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel'shtam" Gregory Freidin writes that "only a cultural orphan growing up in the revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the…
Substantial Proofs of Being
Synthetic Nationality
A world that is your own must be created for you since the one you inhabit has become foreign to you."Petr Chaadaev, "Second Philosophical Letter"In "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel'shtam" Gregory Freidin writes that "only a cultural orphan growing up in the revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the…
The Poetics of Jewishness
Polish Poetry Observed
Pseudo-revolution in Poetic Language
It is important to stress that these peculiar pseudo-revolutions, imported from Russia and carried out under the protection of the army and the police, were full of authentic revolutionary psychology and their adherents experienced them with grand pathos, enthusiasm, and eschatological faith in an absolutely new world. Poets found themselves on the proscenium for the last time. They thought they were playing their customary part in the glorious E…
Remembrance and Invention
oetry and memory: the expanse covered in modern Russian history by these two terms is vast indeed. The three articles collected beneath this rubric in the present issue of The Russian Review may serve us, though, as a kind of shorthand guide to the extensive territory that poetic memory has been called upon to span in the Russian literature and culture of this century-from the recuperation of ancient myths by modern poet-dramatists in Silver Age …
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition
If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an "apocalypse of cultural community," then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a "yearning for world culture," he defined the impulse that charges his own p…
The Death of the Book a la russe
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Forms of the Ordinary
I. Forming the Ordinary In Discourse and the Novel (1934-35), Mikhail Bakhtin famously turns lyric poetry into the straight man or fall guy for his properly dialogic hero, prose fiction, or more precisely, the novel. The function of the poet, in Bakhtin's view, is to close up shop on the prose writer's carnival. He is as resolutely single-minded as his lyrics are single-voiced; and he shuns the social uproar and linguistic cacophony that fuel the…
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition
If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an apocalypse of cultural community, then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a yearning for culture, he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and …
View with a Grain of Sand
In these 100 poems Wislawa Szymborska portrays a world of astonishing diversity and richness, in which nature is wise and prodigal and fate unpredictable, if not mischievous. With acute irony tempered by a generous curiosity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty. The ruins of Troy; sunlight gleaming on a pewter jug; birds returning in the spring; the Abominable Snowman lurking in the Himalayas; a body-building contes…
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition
Lyrical Ethics
Art is not life and cannot beA midwife to society.-W. H. Auden, "New Year Letter," 1940What is poetry which does not saveNations or people?-Czeslaw Milosz, "Dedication," 1945If dictators still wishedto read our wrathful, rabid,well-wrought rhymes, then poetrywould surely change the world.-Adam Zagajewski, "Thorns," 1983
Postcolonial Poland
Research Article| January 01 2004 Postcolonial Poland Clare Cavanagh Clare Cavanagh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2004) 10 (1): 82–92. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-1-82 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Clare Cavanagh; Postcolonial Poland. Common Knowledge 1 January 2004; 10 (1): 82–92. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-1-82 Download citation file:…
Poetry and History
Describing Pictures
Describing Pictures Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh We usually catch just a few details— grapes from the seventeenth century, still gleaming, and perhaps a fine ivory fork, or a cross's wood and drops of blood, and great suffering, which has already dried. The shiny parquet creaks. We're in a strange town— almost always in a strange town. Somewhere a guard stands and yawns. An ash's branch sways outside the window. Describing s…
Spirit of the Age
Sunrise over Cassis
Sunrise over Cassis* Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh In the semi-darkness white buildings loom, not fully formulated, and beside them, the gray vineyards, the quiet before dawn; Judas counts his silver coins, but olive trees contorted in wild prayer enter the earth ever more deeply. Where is the sun! But it’s still cold and a humble landscape spreads around us; the stars have gone and priests sleep greedily, birds aren’t allowe…
The Majesty of Sleep
The Majesty of Sleep* Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh Sleep like the veranda of a country house spreads before you a forest and shadows and the interior of memories. Sleep is the mind free of constraint, the proud capital of poetry and plays, sleep is a thought not yet embodied, fed meagerly by jealous waking. Sleep is Assyria, severe and valiant. Sleep is Tuscany seen at dawn, when slim trees sip ink from the black earth—and a…
December
December* Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh December, herald of destruction, takes you on a long stroll through the black torsos of trees and leaves scorched in autumn’s fire, as if to say: so much then for your secrets and your treasures, the fervent trill of small birds, the promises of summer months. Your dreams have been dissected, the blackbird’s song now has a rationale, plants’ corpses clutter the herbarium. Only the labor…
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics explores the intersection of poetry, national life, and national identity in Poland and Russia, from 1917 to the present. As a corrective to recent trends in criticism, acclaimed translator and critic Clare Cavanagh demonstrates how the practice of the personal lyric in totalitarian states such as Russia and Poland did not represent an escapist tendency; rather it reverberated as a bold political statement and at …
The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture
The difference between and the confusion of Weltansicht with Weltanschauung is discussed by Underhill (2009 and 2011).Says Underhill: "Weltansicht ... is the patterning of conceptual frameworks and the organisation of ideas which makes up the form of language (in Humboldt's definition of form), the patterning within which we think... Weltanschauung ... is the intellectual refinement and elaboration of those fundamental conceptual frameworks which…
Non-strategic” Eastern Europe and the Fate of the Humanities
Until recent events intervened, Eastern European Studies found themselves under attack at my home university and other institutions for being, among other things, “non-strategic.” We see the same notion, if not the same terminology, applied increasingly to the humanities and non-quantitative social sciences, which lose ground daily to the so-called STEM disciplines in both educational policy and practice. How do we defend the study of Eastern Eur…
The Spirit of the Age
None of the stereotypes of Victorian England—narrow-minded, inhibited, moralistic, complacent—prepares us for the vitality, variety, and above all extraordinary quality of intellectual life displayed in this volume of essays. Selected and annotated by Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian of Victorian thought, the writings address a wide range of subjects—religion, politics, history, science, art, socialism, and feminism—by eminent figur…
“Try to praise the mutilated world”
Adam Zagajewski’s poem addresses history’s victims only obliquely, through its refugees and abandoned homesteads. Lyric history, as Zagajewski envisions it, retains its humanity through its specificity and thus remains habitable and human in spite of the endless exiles and executioners. As throughout Zagajewski’s writing, the natural world is steeped in human history, and though he makes no explicit mention of it, this history is clearly informed…
Art (17 works) · Literature (16 works) · History (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Poetry (11 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · Central European Literary Studies (5 works)