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.

BOOK NEWS: Practical approaches to decolonial scholarship founded in humility

Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities

By Suzanne Bost

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

ISBN 978-1-5179-1821-7 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918217/quiet-methodologies/

How might foregrounding the writings of colonized peoples transform the ways we work in the humanities? In an era dominated by loud political rhetoric, Suzanne Bost advocates for quieter modes of scholarship: intellectual humility rather than ego, collaboration and conversation rather than singular argumentation, continual reflection and revision rather than defensiveness, and a willingness to believe in different ways of being and knowing rather than adhering to academic norms. With Quiet Methodologies, she demonstrates practical decolonial scholarship and proposes alternative approaches for fostering meaningful engagement.

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.

Turning to feminist, queer, and decolonial writings from writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and many others, Bost reflects on what we do when we work with literature, culture, and ideas. She weaves together multiple voices, methods of writing, and culturally diverse epistemologies and uses creative devices such as collage, her own original poetry, revision, lists, images, and conversation to disengage academic thought and writing from colonial theories and archives that have passed as neutral. Eschewing conventional monograph formats, her work embraces a reciprocal and heterogeneous learning process with profound ethical implications.

Part of a movement of reimagining research and education through care, Quiet Methodologies is a powerful exploration of the possibilities of criticism during crises. It encourages readers to be visionary and pragmatic, challenging current conditions and offering alternative ideas for the future of the humanities.

"Suzanne Bost’s book is a powerful exploration of literary criticism during an age of crises, when planetary, human, and other-species futurities are at stake. It privileges a careful, porous reading of texts that center the decolonial and the resistant. Bost offers a nuanced reflexivity that never crosses into navel-gazing—and asks us to reimagine how we make scholarly arguments through a method that is dialogical, critical, and even tender."—Piya Chatterjee, coeditor of The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent

"Quiet Methodologies showcases post-oppositional approaches to conventional academic scholarship, creating new opportunities for provocative multispecies, cross-temporal conversations and inter-dimensional communities of knowledge creators. Replacing the combative critique that so often dominates contemporary academic life with intellectual humility, radical inclusivity, invitational pedagogies, and alchemical dialogues, Suzanne Bost offers much-needed possibilities for transformation. I can’t wait to share this book with my students!"—AnaLouise Keating, author of The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook

Suzanne Bost is professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is author of several books, including Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism.

  

BOOK NEWS: Expansive temporality in queer experience

Never on Time, Always in Time: Narrative Form and the Queer Sensorium 

By Kate McCullough

Ohio State UP, 2024.

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1577-7

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215777.html

Queer futures begin with the body. In Never on Time, Always in Time, Kate McCullough explores how writers summon queer bodily experiences by way of the senses: these experiences have much to tell us about the pasts, presents, and futures of queer life. The author discusses how narrative form and techniques represent the senses in order to open a more expansive temporality for writers and readers. 

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.

Can queer futures contain the utopic, while also addressing the violence of the past and present? McCullough argues that a narratology that incorporates the senses is integral to conceptions of queer time, which in its most potent, palpable, and radical expression depends on a rendering of the senses. Never on Time, Always on Time looks at works by Monique Truong, Carol Rifka Brunt, Mia McKenzie, and Alison Bechdel to explore how they invoke the senses to narrate what otherwise seems to be non-narrativizable. McCullough thus reveals a vital queer narratology at work, a mode of reading and writing the senses toward a survivable future. She calls this cluster of contemporary texts “narratives of the queer sensorium,” and argues that representations of the senses in these texts open new perspectives onto history, futurity, and relationality.

“Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.” —G. Sikorski, CHOICE

“Never on Time, Always in Time is a groundbreaking work in narrative theory. It accomplishes a queer narratology that clearly and coherently connects specific narrative devices with such major concerns of queer theory as temporality, futurity, materiality, affect, and anti-heteronormative resistance. A transformative work.” —Robyn Warhol, coeditor of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions

 

Kate McCullough is associate professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885–1914.

BOOK NEWS: Celebrate Bloomsday with new Cambridge edition of Ulysses with notes

The Cambridge Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes

By James Joyce

Edited by Catherine Flynn

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009568449

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/irish-literature/cambridge-ulysses-1922-text-essays-and-notes-library-edition?format=HB

James Joyce's Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. This new edition – first published in 2022 to celebrate the centenary of the book's first publication – helps readers to understand the pleasures of this monumental work and to grapple with its challenges. Copiously equipped with maps, photographs, and explanatory footnotes, it provides a vivid and illuminating context for the experiences of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, as well as Joyce's many other Dublin characters, on June 16, 1904. Featuring a facsimile of the historic 1922 Shakespeare and Company text, this version includes Joyce's own errata as well as references to amendments made in later editions. Each of the eighteen chapters of Ulysses is introduced by a leading Joyce scholar. These richly informative pieces discuss the novel's plot and allusions, while exploring crucial questions that have puzzled and tantalized readers over the last hundred years.

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.

• Provides the 1922 Shakespeare and Company edition with Joyce's own errata notes and an essay on the errata and subsequent editions
• Includes maps and contextual images that help readers visualize the events of the book
• Includes a chronology of Joyce's life and contemporaneous events

Catherine Flynn is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of James Joyce and the Matter of Paris (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and the editor of The New Joyce Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before studying literature, she practiced as an architect in Vienna, Austria, and in her native Ireland.

BOOK NEWS: Modernist depictions of "masculine pregnancy"

Masculine Pregnancies: Modernist Conceptions of Creativity and Legitimacy, 1918-1939

By Aimee Armande Wilson

SUNY Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781438495606

https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Masculine-Pregnancies

Examines literary depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to reframe the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism.

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.

Who is taken seriously as an artist? What does gender have to do with it? Is there a relationship between artistic creation and physical procreation? In Masculine Pregnancies, Aimee Armande Wilson argues that modernist writers used depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to answer these questions. The book places "masculine pregnancies" in works by Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound in the context of interwar debates about eugenics, immigration, midwifery, and sexology in order to redefine the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism. Attending to recent developments in queer theory, Wilson challenges the critical assumption that figures of masculine pregnancy necessarily reinforce oppressive norms. The book's first half shows how some writers indeed used such figures to delegitimize artists who were not white, male, and heterosexual. The second half then shows how others used masculine pregnancies to extend legitimacy to mannish women, dark-skinned immigrants, and their (pro)creations-and did so a century before the current boom in queer pregnancy narratives.

"…this book does contribute to queer theory, interwar cultural history, and modernist literary studies in a significant way. It will appeal to those who want to explore where these branches of inquiry intersect." — CHOICE

"Masculine Pregnancies opens up important new perspectives on queer reproduction. Drawing on cutting-edge work in queer and trans studies, and carefully considering the entanglements of gender, sexuality, racialization, and class, Wilson reveals the uses, meanings, and contemporary legacies of masculine pregnancy in the modernist period." — Jana Funke, coeditor of Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres

Aimee Armande Wilson is associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control.