Faculty

Jacob’s Cane

(2011). Drawn to an image of her great-grandfather’s ornately carved cane, scholar Elisa New embarked on a journey to discover the origins of her precious family heirloom. Treading back across the paths of her ancestors, she travels from Baltimore to the Baltic to London in order to find and understand an immigrant world profoundly affected by modern German culture, from the Enlightenment through the Holocaust.

The Line’s Eye

(1999). Is American vision implicitly possessive, as a generation of critics contends? By viewing the American poetic tradition through the prism of pragmatism, Elisa New contests this claim. A new reading of how poetry “sees,” her work is a passionate defense of the power of the poem, the ethics of perception, and the broader possibilities of American sight.

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Elisa New | Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature

Education: B.A. Brandeis University 1980
M.A. Columbia University 1982
Ph.D Columbia University 1988

Phone: 617-496-2552
enew@fas.harvard.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday 2-4pm; & by appointment
Office: Barker 148

Interests:

American poetry; American Literature-1900; Religion and Literature; Jewish Literature.

Selected Works:

The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (1999); The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (1993).

Faculty

Elisa New | Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature

Faculty Website