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Recent Posts
- post #5, concluding the Preface to my book in progress, _Upcycling Ecopoetry_
- post #4 in the series, from the preface to my book in progress, Upcycling Ecopoetry
- post #3 in the series, from my book in progress Upcycling Ecopoetry
- Post #2 in the series, from the preface to Upcycling Ecopoetry
- Post #1 in a series, all from the preface of my book in progress, _Upcycling Ecopoetry_
Recent Comments
- ankara bo?anma avukat? on On the Game of Thrones title sequence
- Fireborn on Some Reasons Why Daenerys Targaryen’s Character Is Even Better in Game of Thrones Than in Song of Ice and Fire
- Daniel Bosch on Daniel Bosch on Daisy Fried’s poem “Torment”
- Amy on What Should I Do With the Dead Turk in the Bedroom? Class, Sex, and Otherness in Downton Abbey
- Rahul Shayar on On the Game of Thrones title sequence
Pages
- About Me
- Akwete Weave poetry chapbook
- Digital Humanities Projects
- Ecotone // poems by Peter Schmidt // wondering through the natural world …
- Engl 009H “Portraits of the Artist” — an introduction to literary and cultural studies for first-year students.
- English 116 American Literature Honors Seminar, Fall 2014: the Literature of the U.S. South
- English 52A (U.S. Fiction, 1900-1950)
- English 52B, U.S. Fiction 1945 to the Present. Swarthmore College, Fall 2017.
- English 53: Modern American Poetry
- English 53R: Advanced Research Topics in U.S. Literature
- English 71B: The Lyric Poem in English (Fall 2013)
- English 71D: The Short Story in the U.S. (Fall 2018)
- Online Essays
- Pocketa Pocketas (pulses & pips of poems)
- Publications
- “Truth so mazed”: Faulkner and U.S. Plantation Fiction
- A review-essay on William Carlos Williams’ _By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959_
- A selection of older print and digital scholarly work
- On Eros Crossing the Color-Line in William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell
- On Optimists’ Sons and Daughters: Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter and Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis
- Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus
- The “Raftsmen’s Passage,” Huck’s Crisis of Whiteness, and _Huckleberry Finn_ in U.S. Literary History
- Selected Courses
- SPLEEN poetry chapbook: pissed-off poems for a pissant age.
- Very Large Array // a poetry collage project by Peter Schmidt (1990-2000)
- Very Large Array project
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Author Archives: Peter Schmidt
Air Effects (on Proctor & Gamble Febreze TV ads)
Anyone else besides me creeped out by the Febreze air freshener commercials on TV, sponsored by Proctor & Gamble? Some of them feature various folks blindfolded and sequestered in gross spaces—ratty cars, moldy abandoned apartments with scuzzy old couches, etc. … Continue reading
See my U.S. fiction class’s annotations to Gary Shteyngart’s satire _Super Sad True Love Story_ (2010)
Click on the Digital Humanities Projects link in the menu above, which will take you to the table of contents for the annotations and a link to the annotations themselves, in a pdf file. Enjoy! Based on work produced by … Continue reading
Two Mistakes Jonathan Franzen’s Haters and Fans Both Make
Introduction for Jonathan Franzen, Swarthmore College, Feb. 14, 2013. Good evening. Speaking for our community of readers, I’d like to welcome you, Jonathan, back to Swarthmore. As for you, the audience, I will do you credit and not list Jonathan’s … Continue reading
Posted in Literature, Other (including pop culture of all kinds), Swarthmore; Academia
Tagged franzen, literature, novel, satire, tragedy
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Philip Roth Says He’s Done Writing Books – NYTimes.com
Are we supposed to be crestfallen about this news, or just relieved? (I’m very much a fan of Roth’s early and middle period work, but think his fiction precipitously drops in quality beginning with American Pastoral, which was over-written and … Continue reading
Introduction for Zadie Smith’s talk at Swarthmore, Nov. 7 2012: “Why I Write.”
It’s an honor to introduce Zadie Smith. I shouldn’t be nervous, because introductions are easy, right? Zadie Smith, meet Swarthmore College and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Swarthmore, Zadie Smith. Yet introductions are really impossible, because more words need to be said but … Continue reading
Tagging the Glass Essay poem (Anne Carson)
Sometimes ‘tagging’ texts to aid computer searches is utterly fatuous. Here are the tags the Poetry Foundation website uses to catalog the ‘subjects’ of Anne Carson’s magnificent poem “The Glass Essay.” The list below could easily be in a Carson … Continue reading
Favorite epic novels published since WWII?
In response to Matt Schwartz’s question on his Facebook page, “What are some of your favorite sweeping historical brick-sized novels written since World War II, along the lines of Pynchon’s V. and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke?”, here’s my list: … Continue reading
Posted in Literature, Uncategorized
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The critic’s job
Except for all the male pronouns, Alfred Kazin’s credo remains good advice: “A critic must reveal why we read him [a writer]. Everything else—the historical associations, the comparison with other writers, the placing in a school, the social, moral, and … Continue reading
This may be the best short discussion ever written about words as signs (semiotics) vs. words as music, especially in poetry
A. R. Ammons, “Motion” (c. 1961-65) The word is not the thing: is a construction of, a tag for, the thing: the word in no way resembles the thing, except as sound resembles, as in whirr, sound: the relation … Continue reading
Want to see the influence of Chekhov on U.S. short story writing?
This is just one example of Chekhov’s influence, but it’s a great one. An apparently previously unpublished (?) short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, dating from 1936, printed in summer 2012 in The New Yorker. F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Thank You for … Continue reading
Posted in Literature, Uncategorized
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