Full Immersion

This chapter explores how the modernist fiction of Katherine Anne Porter and Ernest Hemingway articulated a link between good writing and expansive personal experience, especially in their works set in Latin America. I begin by reconstructing their development of the literature of experience during the 1920s as an internationalist mode of expanding their knowledge of the world. My second section tracks how, amid the rise of the literary left and Popular Front aesthetics in the 1930s, Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937) and Porter’s “Hacienda” (1937) warned against producing literature derived from ideological positioning as opposed to first-hand eyewitnessing. I close by demonstrating the surprising interest in authorial experience among New Critics such as Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, who “disciplined” the literature of experience by re-envisioning place-based absorption as a matter of formal style, thus setting the tone for debates about authorial experience in the early post-1945 period.

Raise your voice in song! The Origins of the New Japanese Literature Association

This translation of Miyamoto Yuriko’s (1899–1951) 1946 essay constitutes a unique moment in the melding of politics and literature in Japan. Written in the heady days of immediate post-defeat Japan, the essay highlights the strategy of a profoundly optimistic literary left to win the hearts and minds of the Japanese masses. At the same time, however, it also hints at the complicated problem of how to deal with the large numbers of people – intellectuals and writers in particular – who abandoned their affiliations with the communist movement during the war and embraced the militarist regime.