How do studies of the belated and the indirect offer insight into a culture that values the present and the direct? Two books transcend typical readings both of belatedness as mere melancholy and of indirection as pure apathy. Ann Keniston’s Ghostly Figures connects how we look back at the past and its legacies with the fundamental premises (and limits) of close reading, whereas Lisa Diedrich’s Indirect Action advocates for a nonlinear approach that problematizes narratives of health activism.
Ghostly Figures explores how “postwar poems often depict speakers who remember the past only partially, in ways that reveal that memory is itself obstructed” (1–2). For Keniston, belatedness is as psychological as it is formal: a breaching of the standard rules of tropes, the literary structures that keep us in the present and separate us from past and future. Because speakers of belatedness can do so only from the spectatorship of their...
