Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
Welcome to the Journal of Modern Literature news and information site.
Check here for updates about our latest issues, calls for papers, submission guidelines and tips, as well special online-only content. Our issues themselves are available at Project Muse and are archived on JSTOR . Check out the "Read for Free" page to enjoy some featured content.
More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
The editors of the Journal of Modern Literature have instituted a new policy on multiple submissions by the same author, limiting submissions to one per author per 12-month period.
That is, once an author has submitted a piece, they may not submit any others for our consideration for a period of 12 months. We will automatically decline any submission not in compliance with this policy.
JML 48.1 (Fall 2024), with clusters on Gertrude Stein and Continental Modernism, is now live on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54157
Content Includes:
Editorial News: Welcome New Co-Editor Jessica Burstein
Rei Asaba
“You Ain’t Ever Got Any Way to Remember Right”: Black Affectivity, Insistent Style, and Cross-Racial Transference in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha”
Nicole Gantz
Becoming a Minor Literature: Supposing in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
Kelly Krumrie
“Not Unordered”: Gertrude Stein’s Numbers
Chris Raczkowski
“The Man Being Dead”: Stein, Modernism and Detective Stories
Thomas Waller
Confessional Desire: Censorship and Repression in Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s A Confissão de Lúcio
Fredrik Tydal
“A Man Without Scruples”: The Swedish Judgment of Jay Gatsby
Edward Waysband
The Politics of Childhood in Vladislav Khodasevich’s “Infancy”
James Martell
Modernism’s Totalities: From the Marquis de Sade to Titus-Carmel
Feng Dong
Overcoming Gravity: Celan, Nietzsche, and Nihilism
Ken R. Hanssen
W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Problems of Representation
Philipp Wolf
Mimesis: A Protean Concept
Amalia Cotoi
How Philosophy Turns up Its Nose at Smell: A Review of Simon Hajdini’s What’s That Smell? A Philosophy of the Olfactory
Cannibalizing the Canon: Dada Techniques in East-Central Europe
Edited by Oliver A. I. Botar, Irina M. Denischenko, Gábor Dobó, and Merse Pál Szeredi
Brill, 2024
ISBN: 978-90-04-52673-0
https://brill.com/display/title/63526?language=en&contents=editorial-content
This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Cannibalizing the Canon has the merit of shedding light on under-researched territories and overlooked issues in avant-garde historiography, restoring the contributions of those artists who did not figure in the canonical constructions of Dadaism and incorporating ephemeral art forms. Using new theoretical approaches and methodological frameworks, the volume challenges the singularity of Dadaism and its founding myths. The focus on the connections between local avant-gardes, employing transmedial and transnational perspectives, corrects and nuances some directions from avant-garde histories, contesting the hegemony of the West and a hierarchical system. Thus, the volume brings a significant contribution to the Dada movement and to the research of the avant-garde.
Oliver Botar is a professor of art history and associate director of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. His research focuses on early 20th-century Central European Modernism, particularly the work of Moholy-Nagy, with concentrations on art in alternative media, and “Biocentrism” and Modernism in early-to-mid 20th-century art.
Irina Denischenko is an assistant professor at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literature and visual art--especially the avant-garde, on critical theory, as well as on women’s contributions to avant-garde and modernist aesthetics in Central and Eastern Europe.
Gábor Dobó is a research fellow at the Kassák Museum in Budapest. He is the principal investigator of a project focusing on the artist couple Lajos Kassák and Jolán Simon. In 2022, he was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Columbia University.
Merse Pál Szeredi is department head at the Kassák Museum. His research focuses on Hungarian avant-garde art and the history of Lajos Kassák’s magazine Ma in Vienna between 1920 and 1925, with special emphasis on its international networks.
Ohio State UP, 2024
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5906-1
https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215654.html
Tapping a rich vein of Latin American literature, Deformative Fictions by Ashley Hope Pérez excavates works that unsettle, defamiliarize, and disrupt access to the conventional pleasures of reading and interpretation. Close readings highlight the nuances of texts that have been misread, underread, or fetishized because they depart from literary norms, including fiction by Roberto Bolaño and Silvina Ocampo.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Interweaving rhetorical and narratological analysis with reflections on the ethical stakes of writing, reading, and interpreting deformative fictions and fictional cruelty, Pérez issues a resounding entreaty for us to expand our understandings of the value of narrative beyond the logics of utility and comfort. Doing so, she contends, allows readers to embrace the full possibilities of the relationships among authors, readers, and the worlds we inhabit on and off the page. In defamiliarizing the act of reading, deformative fictions reacquaint us with its ethical weight.
“Pérez brings a rich genealogy of Latin American literature into the narrative studies tradition, convincingly arguing why we should read works that refuse to offer us comfort. She offers critical food for thought for researchers and teachers alike, employing a beautiful writing style that illustrates complex ideas with ease.” —Doug P. Bush, author of Capturing Mariposas: Reading Cultural Schema in Gay Chicano Literature
Ashley Hope Pérez is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of the novels What Can’t Wait The Knife and the Butterfly, and Out of Darkness and the editor of the forthcoming anthology Banned Together: Authors and Allies on the Fight for Readers’ Rights.
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Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction
BY JERRY RAFIKI JENKINS
Ohio State UP, 2024
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5905-4
https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215364.html
In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction, Jerry RafikiJenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction—the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial killing—arguing that such monsters represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness. Jenkins examines a variety of these monstrous forms in Tananarive Due’s The Between, Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, and many other works. While these monsters and the texts that they populate ask us to think about the role that anti-Blackness plays in being or becoming American, they also offer intellectual resources that Black and non-Black people might use to combat the everyday versions of human monstrosity.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
“Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction is a necessary work that emphasizes the sanity and rationality of monstrous figures. Jenkins persuasively contends that combining Afropessimism and affirmation of Black life in fiction can provide resistance to the deadliness of the racial reality of anti-Blackness.” —Keith Byerman, author of Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction
“Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction is sharp and intellectually daring. Jenkins’s treatment of violence and prospects of Black counter-violence make it a timely resource for Black studies scholars and social and cultural critics of all kinds.” —Greg Thomas, author of Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil’ Kim’s Lyricism
Jerry Rafiki Jenkins is a professor in the Departments of English and Humanities, and Multicultural Studies at Palomar College and the author of The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction.
