BOOK NEWS: A critique of "true feeling" in late-twentieth-century fiction

The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth

By Nicholas Manning

Edinburg UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399508001

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-artifice-of-affect.html

Is emotional truth a damaging literary and cultural ideal? The Artifice of Affect proposes that valuing affective authenticity risks creating a homogenized self, encouraged to comply only with accepted moral beliefs. Similarly, when emotional truth is made the primary value of literature, literary texts too often become agents of conformity. Nowhere is this risk explored more fully than in a range of American realist texts from the Cold War to the twentieth century’s end. For the works of writers such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Kathleen Collins, Paula Fox, Ralph Ellison, or Richard Yates, formulate trenchant critiques of true feeling’s aesthetic and social imperatives. The arguments at the heart of this book aim to re-frame emotional processes as visceral constructions, which should not be held to the standards of static ideals of accuracy, legitimacy, or veracity.

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.

• Offers a literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
• Proposes a wide-ranging literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, especially relevant to the United States’s current sociopolitical climate
• Represents the first book-length study using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
• Argues that twentieth-century American realism is not a conservative genre, but rebels in surprising ways against restrictive notions of authenticity
• Links key concepts in current affect theory with writers such as Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Richard Ford, Paula Fox or Philip Roth, who have never been analyzed using these tools
• Models a new transdisciplinary interaction between affect theory and literature, with literary texts used to reveal the ever-present artifice of corporal processes
• Combines methods from affect theory, literary studies, and the medical humanities

"An elegant, impressive account of American realism's encounters with the aesthetic and political challenges of representing emotion. Boldly anti-foundationalist in its critiques of universalizing approaches to literary value, Manning's book embraces bodily agency and the fluidity and meta-reflexivity of affective circuits, with far-reaching consequences for understanding the creation of literary and ethical meanings." – Adam J. Frank, University of British Columbia

Nicholas Manning is professor of American literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. 

Introducing JML's first BOOK, On Beckett, On!

On Beckett, On!, published by Indiana University Press, brings together thirteen Journal of Modern Literature essays on Beckett with two previously unpublished pieces that demonstrate how exciting and productive Samuel Beckett scholarship has become, encompassing philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, contemporary history, and literary theory.

Available HERE in paperback and as an ebook

Contents

Introduction, by Jean-Michel Rabaté

Nothing is Impossible: Bergson, Beckett, and the Pursuit of the Naught, by Jeremy Colangelo

Beckettian Habit and Deictic Exhaustion, by Shuta Kiba

Glitches in Logic in Beckett's Watt: Toward a Sensory Poetics, by Amanda M. Dennis

Beckett's Vessels and the Animation of Containers, by Hunter Dukes

Blanchot in Infinite Conversation(s) with Beckett, by Arleen Ionescu

Beckett, Painting and the Question of "the human", by Kevin Brazil

Art of Impoverishment: Beckett and arte povera, by Erika Mihálycsa

Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception, by Emilie Morin

Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity, by Ruben Borg

Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, and Posthumanistic Ethics, by Karalyn Kendall-Morwick

A Defense of Wretchedness: Molloy and Humiliation, by Rick De Villiers

Who Hobbles after the Subject: Parables of Writing in The Third Policeman and Molloy, by Yael Levin

" 'Tis my muse will have it so": Four Dimensions of Scatology in Molloy, by Andrew G. Christensen

"Strange laughter": Post-Gothic Questions of Laughter and the Human in Samuel Beckett's Work, by Hannah Simpson

The Illusionless: Adorno and the Afterlife of Laughter in How It Is, by Michelle Rada

BOOK NEWS: How portrait photos serve as literary motifs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf

Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion

By Marit Grøtta

Edinburgh UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781399526982

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-reading-portrait-photographs-in-proust-kafka-and-woolf.html

Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grøtta discusses these writers’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.

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.

• Considers the emotional and relational implications of portrait photographs for three modernist writers
• Offers a comparative study of the motif of reading portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf
• Discusses how portrait photographs prompt feelings of love and gratification as well as feelings of frustration and distress in the beholders
• Discusses the modernists’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of such pictures early in the 20th century
• Reconsiders the modernists’ relation to the visual media and the possibilities for contact, communication, and sympathy early in the twentieth century
• Considers how the increased circulation of portrait photographs transformed human relations and the relation between the private and the public spheres

"Marit Grøtta makes us see how Proust, Kafka and Woolf read faces mediated by photography and revealing truth, power and sympathy in this wonderful new physiognomy of modernism." – Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

"This illuminating reading of portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf offers both a probingly fresh understanding of modernism and a genealogy of our face-infested moment and scrambled private-public boundaries." – John Durham Peters, Yale University

Marit Grøtta is professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and a number of articles on Schlegel, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Queneau, and Agamben. Her research interests are nineteenth-century and modernist literature, visual culture, media philosophy and aesthetic theory.

BOOK NEWS: Modern literature and the science of sleep

Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929 

By Sebastian P. Klinger

Johns Hopkins UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781421450803

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53855/sleep-works

At the turn of the twentieth century, sleep began to be seen not merely as a passive state but as an active, dynamic process crucial to our understanding of consciousness and identity. In Sleep Works, cultural historian and literary scholar Sebastian P. Klinger explores the intriguing connections between scientific inquiry and literary expression during an era when sleep was both a scientific mystery and a cultural fascination.

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.

Scientists, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies were at the forefront of this newfound fascination with sleep: some researchers distinguished sleep from related states such as fatigue and hypnosis, while others investigated sleep disorders and developed treatments for insomnia. Meanwhile, literary giants like Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust grappled with their own sleep disturbances and channeled these experiences into their writing. Through the lens of their discoveries, Klinger reveals the broader implications of sleep for concepts of selfhood and agency.

Tracing the emergence of interdisciplinary sleep science and the cultural production of sleep through literature, Sleep Works weaves together literary analysis, historical context, and research in the archives of the pharmaceutical industry to provide a comprehensive and compelling account of how sleep has been understood, represented, and experienced in the modern era.

"So much has been written on dreams in literature, so little on the experience of sleep itself. Klinger's fascinating book breaks the mould by placing texts by Proust, Valéry, Kafka, Rilke, and Schnitzler in the context of the sleep science of the early 20th century, as well as the burgeoning drug industry. Paying close attention to language and form, it shows how literary works generated new modes for discussing and understanding sleep. A major contribution to literature and science studies." — Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford

"Klinger's book is that rare piece of scholarship that takes up a familiar topic and transforms it into a genuinely new field of inquiry. His incisive analyses introduce us to the poetics of good and bad sleep while showing how literary discourses perform their own sleep experiments." — Jan Mieskowski, Reed College

Sebastian P. Klinger is a researcher and teacher-scholar in the department of German Studies at the University of Vienna, as well as an Honorary Faculty Research Fellow in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Mosquito Narrators and the Subaltern Voice, A Closer Look at JML 48.3

Romy Rajan notes that categorizing the novel The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell "is a challenge for the critic, because of the different genres it inhabits. It is historical fiction, domestic fiction, as well as science fiction, and won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020. The generic opacity is no accident—it is at one with the novel’s part-human, part-machine, and part-insect narrator, who also updates the meaning of the subaltern."

Read more here: https://iupress.org/connect/blog/mosquito-narrators-and-the-subaltern-voice-a-closer-look-at-jml-48-3/

His JML 48.3 essay is available FREE, linked in the post!

NEW ISSUE: JML 48.3 "Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny" is now LIVE

Journal of Modern Literature 48.3 (Spring 2025) on the theme "Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny" is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55227

Content includes

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

Editor’s Introduction: Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny

Romy Rajan

Subaltern Mosquitoes and Cyborg Histories in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

FREE

Tracy A. Stephens 

Kinship as a Counter to the Settler Gaze in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians 

Emad Mirmotahari 

Revisiting Juan José Saer’s El entenado / The Witness—Forty Years Later 

Isabelle Wentworth

Fluid Dynamics of Queer Desire: Ellen van Neerven’s “Water” and Lía Chara’s Agua 

Trevor Westmoreland

Inverting the Coordinates: Place, Dystopia and Utopia in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West 

Xiaofan Amy Li

Neo-Surrealism in Hong Kong: The Fiction of Hon Lai-chu and Dorothy Tse

Stanka Radović

Alice in Monsterland: Neocolonial Investigation in J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes

Mara Reisman 

Grotesque Spaces and Transformative Nature in Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque 

Tiasa Bal and Gurumurthy Neelakantan 

Memory, Uncanny, and Spectrality in Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon 

Umar Shehzad

“[D]elete the face it’s preferable”: Prosopagnosia as an Artistic Practice in Samuel Beckett’s Work

Xiaoshan Hou and Fuying Shen

Puppet and Paralipsis: The Performance of Maria and the Narrator in Joyce’s “Clay”

Derek Ryan 

Review: Abstraction for All

Seeking ecocriticism essays for future issue

 

Journal of Modern Literature seeks to expand a future cluster on ecocriticism of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and poetry. 

Submissions should comply with our guidelines, available HERE. Please email a Word or Rich Text Format document, formatted according to the guidelines, to jml.editorial (at) gmail.com.