From the Editor

This issue begins on a poignant note, as its first essay, “Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Theory of Flight’ and The Middle of the Air,” is posthumously published. Lexi Rudnitsky died suddenly and very prematurely three years ago while she was undertaking a biography of Muriel Rukeyser and while this essay was in the revision stage with Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. It took some time for us, in consultation with her family, to determine how best to approach the publication of this essay. David Goldstein, a friend of Rudnitsky who at the time was an assistant professor of English at the University of Tulsa (he has since, to my sadness, moved on to another university), graciously offered to prepare the essay for publication. I owe him many thanks for serving as the primary editor of this essay and for working with Sarah Theobald-Hall and me on copyediting and proofs. I am most grateful to Alexander Stille, Rudnitsky’s husband, who gave us permission to publish the essay and who answered many queries as we took the essay through the editorial process. I never had the pleasure of knowing Lexi Rudnitsky, but overseeing this essay’s publication has convinced me that the scholarly community has lost a great deal from her early death.

“Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics” is an examination of Rukeyser’s fascination with flight in two of her works: “Theory of Flight,” a poem (and the title of her poetry collection) published in 1935, and The Middle of the Air, a play performed in 1945. Through insightful readings of both texts Rudnitsky argues that Rukeyser “was . . . among the first to invoke the discourse of technology to stake out a protofeminist position.” Her approach was antinostalgic, “recasting the airplane as an instrument for political, sexual, and poetic liberation” that allows women to break away from traditional roles and behaviors through new technology. Her work also was consciously and directly antifascist, arguing for example that planes can facilitate democracy, while it developed a new poetics that dealt directly with the politics of art. As Rudnitsky notes, Rukeyser is an important and overlooked writer who was often denigrated in her day for overstepping the bounds of her gender, and who inspired later poets including Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, and Stephanie Strickland. This essay does much to reposition Rudnitsky within a modernist canon while it advances our understanding of the feminist potential Rukeyser found in a technology often regarded in opposition to femininity.

Laura Heffernan shares with Rudnitsky a desire to rectify the exclusion of women from the modernist canon. Her focus, however, is on the way in which “the institutional formation of modernism eclips[ed] not just literary styles, but alternative modes of interpretation and critical practice.” In “Reading Modernism’s Cultural Field: Rebecca West’s The Strange Necessity and the Aesthetic ‘System of Relations,’” Heffernan asks, “What would it mean to position West as a forgotten critic of modernism?” West’s opposition to the “ideology of aesthetic formalism” associated with T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism is not the counterpart to a valorizing of personal or less formalized writing so often marked as feminine. Rather, the starting point of West’s criticism is an acknowledgment that “literary value does not arise from a work’s internal form, but is rather manufactured within a social field.” A deeply nuanced and attentive reading of The Strange Necessity, a text that Heffernan argues has been interpreted chiefly through oppositions between personal and impersonal aesthetics, yields West’s “articulation of an aesthetic theory that incorporates a model of the cultural field within which aesthetic value is formed.” The result is not only an assertion of West’s still undervalued significance as a modernist author, but also a new appraisal of what might constitute a modernist feminist aesthetic.

“Dreaming Gender: Kyōgoku School of Japanese Women Poets (Re)Writing the Feminine Subject” is an exciting departure in both geography and chronology from the modern and Western literature usually studied in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. In this essay Joe Parker examines the work of two women...