Robert Zaller

This work is the first volume of critical essays devoted to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Although Jeffers was likened to some of the greatest figures in the literary world, his work was controversial. His preoccupation with violence and sexuality was denounced by some, his alleged blasphemy by others. Condemned by moralists, Marxists, and Cold Warriors alike, Jeffers fell into obscurity until his death in 1962. Included are nine original essays by leading Jeffers scholars.

Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers

A Casebook on Anaïs Nin

John K. Fairbank

T. Jefferson Kline

Lynda K. Bundtzen

Robert B. Burgoyne

Fatmah Tobing Rony

Estelle Shane

Fabien S. Gerard

Ding Ning

Morton Shane

Vittorio Storaro

In this anthology, filmmakers, psychoanalysts, film scholars, and cultural historians use a psychoanalytic approach to examine Bernardo Bertolucci's epic film The Last Emperor (I988). Evolving out of a conference on Bertolucci's work,the essays interweave psychological, political, and cinematic themes in The Last Emperor as well as in much of Bertolucci's other works. This volume includes a foreword by Bernardo Bertolucci and is organized into four parts or "takes," including "Filmcraft," "Psychoanalysis," "Film Scholarship," and "Cultural History." Although we can never fully know the real Aisingioro Pu Yi, Bertolucci used his vision of the intricate relationship between art, ideology, and the psychic experience to tell the story of one ordinary man's extraordinary life. Bertolucci's The Last Emperor hopes to illuminate this complex and often enigmatic creation as well as renew an excitement about the possibilities of interdisciplinary criticism in film studies.

Multiple Takes

Bertolucci's The Last Emperor

Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.

Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime

Robert Zaller

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