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Article
Frontierwhorlroamer: Eugene Jolas’s Cosmopoetics
Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices
  • Ania Spyra, Butler University
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2019
DOI
https://doi.org/10.22363/2618-897X-2019-16-4-595-607
Additional Publication URL
http://journals.rudn.ru/polylinguality/article/view/22559/17635
Abstract

The article analyzes Eugene Jolas’ two multilingual poems “Frontier-Poem” (1935) and “America Mystica” (1937) in the transnational context of European Union and hemispheric conceptualizations of the Americas to show how Jolas worked towards a new paradigm and terminology to name the transnational identities created through mass migrations and unstable boundaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With poetic sensibility forged at the confluence of the utilitarian jargon of journalism and the irrepressible plurality of the collective unconscious, Jolas’s cosmopoetics offered the universal language of Atlantica, which, paradoxically, was to be both all-inclusive (consisting of essences of all idioms in the world) and universally spoken. Only such a language promised literary expression for the “frontierwhorlroamer”, whose poetics grew out of linguistic mixtures of trans-continental wandering.

Rights

Originally published by Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices under a CCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. in Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices, 2019, Volume 16, Issue 4. DOI: 10.22363/2618-897X-2019-16-4-595-607.

Citation Information
Ania Spyra. "Frontierwhorlroamer: Eugene Jolas’s Cosmopoetics" Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices Vol. 16 Iss. 4 (2019) p. 595 - 607
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ania_spyra/35/