The Poetics of Defeat

Jay Cantor is a novelist, essayist, scholar, and screenwriter who has taught for many years in the Department of English at Tufts University. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. He worked closely with Norman O. Brown while a graduate student in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the 1970s. His first book, The Space Between: On Literature and Politics (1982), was adapted from the PhD dissertation he wrote with Brown. His numerous works of fiction include the novels The Death of Che Guevara (1983) and Great Neck (2003), both important meditations on and explorations of the transformations of the 1960s.