Word: poirier
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...first year as judge of the O. Henry Awards (for the best stories to appear in periodicals), Richard Poirier, assistant professor of English has selected twelve of English, has selected twelve pieces whose authors each speak with an original voice. All twelve deal in one way or other with the theme of the alienated American, with the idea that American social institutions are insufficient to the task of meaningfully ordering men's lives...
...brief but perceptive introduction, Poirier correctly blames the generally "dispirited condition of contemporary fiction" for the quality of current magazines--not vice versa. He directs his criticism toward those writers in whom he finds a failure to develop a personal voice and, hence, "a surrender to certain fashionable themes, situations, or characters" or to "some commercially established standards of form and craft." He further notes that the plea in the greatest American fiction has been for an intensely personal view of reality, springing from "a lack of confidence in the solidity of social structures other than the one being created...
...simpler joys of her youth. She is an uprooted; it is a credit to Miss Olsen's style that one can come to the Jewess' cry--"Where now? Not home yet?... Not home yet? Where is my home?"--and not despair of its baldness. The final scene is, as Poirier notes, "brilliantly timed," a climax of power evoking a grand release of tension in the reader, reminding him of his inescapable wish to recapture the happiness of the past, "that joyous certainty, that sense of moving and being moved, of being one and indivisible with the great of the past...
...second prize, Poirier chose a tragicomic story by Ivan Gold, and made clear how closely it too displays the search by the writer for authentic attitudes, his impatience with conventional social definitions. Called "The Nickel Misery of George Washington Carver Brown," it tells of the death (interestingly, five of the twelve prizewinners deal with dying) of Brown, one of two Negroes in a basic training platoon. Gold satirizes the remaining main characters--the embittered Corporal Cherry, Private Hines, whose inclusion makes it clear that Gold is not particularly concerned with Brown as a member of a minority group, and Private...
...Bullitt '43, associate professor of English will conduct a course on in the Eighteenth Century . The course, to be given in the will "focus mainly on English A survey of "American Fiction 1890" will be undertaken by Poirier, assistant professor of English Among the authors to be Howells, James, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner...