Non-Fiction

 Winner of the Covici Award for Best Essay on American Literature          

      In his essay “Hawthorne’s Genealogy of Madness: ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ and Disciplinary Individualism” Stephen Knadler places Nathaniel Hawthorne within the context of a growing societal apperception of mental illness and insanity, as opposed to mere stupidity or oddity. Knadler argues that in The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne recognizes “a new configuration of power invested in systems of classification” as well as certain principles of Freudian psychoanalysis avant le lettre (Knadler 282). Though Knadler’s argument is sound and convincing, it would do him credit (especially in light of his apparent new historicist inclinations) to acknowledge Charles Brockden Brown’s prior anticipation of these historical phenomena both stylistically and thematically as evidenced by (among other works) “Somnambulism: A Fragment.” ... more

  Winner of the Bond Award for Best Essay on Poetry

         That we engage in the act of titling artistic works says something about our culture.  Rather than just allow the iconography or content of the work to dictate its name (i.e. the Byzantines called an icon of Christ simply “Christ”), the modern author cannot relinquish control to his audience, and must name the work himself.  The title, then, becomes an interesting part of the work –- essential for communicating with others exactly which poem or painting they are discussing, but also essential for pointing the audience’s thoughts in a particular direction.  Of all of the titles I have ever encountered, that of Robert Frost’s poem “The Investment” (52) may be the most enigmatic.  The poem speaks of many investments, some of which are obvious, like a house, a harvest, or a piano.  However, the poem’s main investment is in relationships -- of people to each other, of course, but also of more conceptual pairs, such as time to space or darkness to brightness. “The Investment” expresses these relationships through carefully arranged spatial, emotional, and temporal idea pairs which allow the poet to blend and compress time, place, and person.... more