BOOK NEWS: Defamiliarizing reading via "deformative" Latin American fiction

Deformative Fictions: Cruelty and Narrative Ethics in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
By Ashley Hope Pérez

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.

BOOK NEWS: Roundup of December sales on academic books

 

The following publishers are offering discounts on their books for a limited time:

Bloomsbury Academic, 30% off selected titles through 12/8 

Hopkins Press, 40% off all books through 12/8 with code HCYB24 

Oxford University Press, 25% off sitewide through 12/8 with code WEBXSTU92 

PSU Press, Save 40% sitewide through 12/20 with promo code HOL24  

SUNY Press, 50% on most books through 12/22 with code HOLIDAY24 

Syracuse University Press, 40% off all titles through 12/31 with code 05Snow24 

UGA Press, 50% sitewide through 12/20 with code 08HLDY24 

University of Iowa Press, select titles deeply discounted 

University of Minnesota Press, 30% off literary studies through Feb. 1, 2025 with code MN92260 

Journal of Modern Literature is on Bluesky

 

Journal of Modern Literature left the social media platform X/Twitter at the end of November. Please follow us over on Bluesky instead, at https://bsky.app/profile/journalofmodlit.bsky.social

BOOK NEWS: Human monstrosity in Black horror fiction

 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.

Welcome new JML co-editor Jessica Burstein

 

Jessica Burstein has been promoted from advisory editor to co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Burstein has had a long career in editing, learning while serving as a lackey (the term “editorial assistant” had yet to be invented, and those chosen did not appear on the masthead) at Critical Inquiry; then serving as the first founding managing editor of Modernism/modernity, beginning in a room with a chair, a phone, and a rolodex, and putting together its early issues. 

As an associate professor in the Department of English and adjunct in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, Burstein currently serves on the editorial boards of Modern Language Quarterly, as well as the advisory editorial board of Modernism/modernity. Their own critical work focuses on fashion and modernism; but they nurse a residual fondness for the history of sciences, and contemporary fiction. Burstein’s novel What It Was Like Not To Sleep With You has yet to find a press; meanwhile you can find Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art in an art history library near you.

Forster's musical Lucy Churchill and proto-nuclear aesthetics: A Closer Look at JML 47.4

In a special feature for the Indiana University Press blog, author Ryan James McGuckin discusses female musicality in A Room with a View, and sees in the novel's inconclusive romance—as well as in Forster's 1958 essay "A View without a Room"—hints that the fear of nuclear annihilation forecloses hope about the future. Read it at https://iupress.org/connect/blog/e-m-forsters-nuclear-aesthetics-a-closer-look-at-jml-47-4/

McGuckin's JML 47.4 essay, “E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View,” is available to read for FREE.

JML 47.4 (Summer 2024) is now LIVE!

 

JML 47.4 (Summer 2024) with clusters on Virginia Woolf and literary misfits is now LIVE on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53384

Content includes:

Woolf

Kate M. Nash

The Ecology of Virginia Woolf’s London Scene

 

Gabriel Quigley

Moments of Rupture: Woolf, Whitehead, Deleuze 

Timothy O’Leary

Years and Years: The Distribution of the Sensible in Woolf and Ernaux 

Misfits

Abhipsa Chakraborty

Vernacular Acoustics: Caste, Embodiment, and the Politics of Listening in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935)

Carly Overfelt 

“To Suggest the Sound”: Impressibility and the Language of Whiteness in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Long Fiction 

Lillianna G. Wright

“A Fascination, Strange and Compelling”: Marriage as the Prevention of Queerness in Nella Larsen’s Passing 

Ryan James McGuckin 

E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View 

FREE

Tim Clarke

The Consolations of Decadence in John Fante’s Ask the Dust 

Susan Poursanati and Maryam Neyestani

Sisyphean or Medusan: The Absurd Hero in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea  

Reviews  

Anna Nygren

Rewriting the Narrative of Modernisms 

Andrew Hui

The Once and Always Baroque

Benjamin Schreier

How to Be a Critic

Afterword

Daniel T. O’Hara

Memorial Tributes