2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

David C. Estes, ed., Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1994).
Essays by fourteen scholars providing thoughtful analyses of Gaines’s work.

Marcia Gaudet, “Gaines’ Fifteen Narrators: Narrative Style and Storytelling
Technique in A Gathering of Old Men,” Louisiana Folklore Miscellany, 6, 3
(1990): 15–22.
Close examination of Gaines’s use of oral tradition.

Maria Hebert-Leiter, “A Breed Between: Racial Mediation in the Fiction of
Ernest Gaines,” MELUS, 31 (Summer 2006): 95–117.
Provides historical information about the ethnic communities in Louisiana and
their interdependence.

Charles J. Heglar and Annye L. Refoe, “Aging and the African-American Com-
munity: The Case of Ernest J. Gaines,” in Aging and Identity, edited by Sara
Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker (Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
1999), pp. 139–148.
Examines how Gaines challenges stereotypes of the elderly.

—Linda Trinh Moser

h

Louise Glück (1943– )

Louise Elisabeth Glück (pronounced glick) does not shy away from autobio-
graphical elements in her work. Her poems are often centered on scenes from
childhood and her relationships with parents and other family members, lovers,
her son, and the natural world. Her method, however, is not to reproduce life
events exactly as they happened but to reshape them through art. In Proofs and
Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994) she observes, “The source of art is experience,
the end product truth, and the artist, surveying the actual, constantly inter-
venes and manages, lies and deletes, all in the service of truth.” Her attempts
to uncover the truth include its darker aspects, and she writes most frequently
about loss, pain, rejection, disappointment, and betrayal. She avoids, however,
the myopic and self-indulgent tendencies of the confessional mode by deflect-
ing the autobiographical self in her use of archetypes from Greek myth, the
Bible, and fairy tales. Speaking through various personae, Glück finds libera-
tion from a singular perspective or subjectivity. As critic Helen Vendler notes,
she “trie[s] in her poetry to give experience the permanent form of myth”
without attempting to make the autobiographical or personal mythic.
Despite the autobiographical nature of her poetry, Glück has remained quiet
about the particulars of her life in interviews and essays. Born in New York City
on 22 April 1943, she was raised on Long Island. Her mother attended Wellesley
and her father, Daniel Glück, was a businessman who invented the X-Acto knife;