Beckett's humility/humiliation nexus: a Closer Look at JML 42.4

Take a closer look at JML 42.4 (Summer 2019). Rick de Villiers discusses how Samuel Beckett's Molloy adds to our understanding of the Beckettian humility/humiliation nexus. 

Read his post HERE

English submissions, please!

A quick clarification: Journal of Modern Literature is an English-language journal. While we consider studies ABOUT literatures in all languages, we do not consider submissions themselves that are not in English. 

All non-English passages you quote must have English translations provided. See MLA 8th edition, section 1.3.8, for formatting details.

See also our detailed submission guidelines here: https://journalofmodernliterature.blogspot.com/p/submission-guidelines.html

Dangerous epistles in Joyce and Proust: A Closer Look at JML 42.4

Take a closer look at JML 42.4 (Summer 2019). David Spurr discusses how controversial political figures--Dreyfus and Parnell--appear in the fiction of Proust and Joyce, and how the role of forged letters in both cases influence these authors' work.

Read it HERE.

JML 42.4, A modernist lineage: Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee

JML 42.4 (Summer 2019), on the theme "Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee," is now available!

Read it on JSTOR and Project Muse. 

The sequence of names heading this issue’s thematic clusters—James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and John M. Coetzee—embody an ideal modernist lineage. Indeed, Beckett began his career as Joyce’s unofficial secretary, and he always named Joyce’s devotion to his art as influencing his decision to pursue a literary rather than academic career. Coetzee, who started out as a computer expert and an English professor, wrote an excellent dissertation on the style of Beckett’s Watt, as well as important essays on Beckett. Beckett offered both a repertoire of literary techniques and a model of ethical integrity. This sequence of names suggests that modernism has not yet lost its purchase as an umbrella term. Modernism has not been replaced by the “posts” that have been tried and petered out, one after the other. 

Issue content includes:

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Editor’s Introduction: Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee

David Spurr 

Trials of the Letter in Joyce and Proust

Neil R. Davison

“Ivy Day”: Dublin Municipal Politics and Joyce’s Race-Society Colonial Irish Jew 

Georgina Binnie 

“Photo girl he calls her”: Re-Reading Milly in Ulysses 

Elizabeth M. Bonapfel 

Joyce’s Punctuation and the Evolution of Narrative in Finnegans Wake 

Megan Girdwood

“Danced through its seven phases”: Samuel Beckett, Symbolism, and Stage Choreographies 

Rick de Villiers 

A Defense of Wretchedness: Molloy and Humiliation 

Patrick Whitmarsh 

“So it is I who speak”: Communicating Bodies in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and The Unnamable 

Emilie Morin

Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception

Shannon Forest

Challenging Secularity’s Posthistorical “Destination”: J.M. Coetzee’s Radical Openness in the Jesus Novels

Marc Farrant 

Finitizing Life: Between Reason and Religion in J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Novels

Ian Tan 

Ways into Joycean Silences: Reviewing James Joyce’s Silences 

Michelle Chiang 

Samuel Beckett and Modernist Film Culture: Review of Samuel Beckett and Cinema

Arya Aryan 

The Late Style of Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee as Postmodernist Cynics 

Erin A. Smith

Modernism for the Middle Class 

Eavesdropping with George Chauncey: A Closer Look at JML 42.3

Take a closer look at JML 42.3 (Spring 2019). Benjamin Kahan discusses his essay that revisits George Chauncey's influential text Gay New York (1994). By expanding the literary archive to include Harlem Renaissance texts, Kahan encounters a series of African-American figures that are absent from Chauncey’s categories.

Read his post HERE.

A Closer Look at JML 42.3 (Spring 2019): Whence Waste?

Now on the press's blog, author Alexander Adkins discusses the role of disgust in postcolonial fiction explored in his essay, "Neoliberal Disgust in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger." He asks: what purpose did scatology serve in the aftermath of decolonization? What might its recent iterations tell us about the role of satire today?

Read it HERE.

Sad goodbye to JML advisory editor Joshua B. Lukin

It is with great sorrow that the editors of JML acknowledge the sudden passing of advisory editor Joshua B. Lukin, who was known to all as a good man and a brilliant interlocutor.  We offer our sincerest condolences to his family and friends, and especially his wife Ann Keefer.  He will be missed terribly.

Philadelphia Inquirer obituary

Joshua B. Lukin Biography 

Josh Lukin taught full-time in Temple University’s First-Year Writing Program, where he has earned five Outstanding Teacher citations and been inducted into the Instructors’ Hall of Fame; he has also taught literature courses in the history of criticism, contemporary global fiction, noir film and fiction, and social issues in literature. His scholarly interests included U.S. Fiction since 1945 and Disability Studies. Josh has published articles, reviews, and interviews in such venues as Journal of Modern Literature, MLN, minnesota review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Encyclopedia of American Disability History. He was the editor of Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), an anthology in which he and six other scholars look at how, in an era where older modes of resistance were discredited, stigmatized, or destroyed, literature illuminated the efforts of marginalized groups to salvage or to reconceptualize their struggles for rights and recognition.

Dr. Lukin served on the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession and on Temple’s Interdisciplinary Faculty Council on Disability. His work has been taught at many schools, among them the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, Purdue North Central, the University of Minnesota, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, Central Michigan University, National Chiao Tung University, the University of Chicago, San Diego State University, Southern Illinois University, and Haverford College. His last projects include a collection of his interviews with feminist authors and Noir Recognitions, a study of identity in the 1950s novels of Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Philip Dick. He lived in Philadelphia and enjoyed dining out, folksinging, classical theater, chamber music, and feline companionship.

JML 42.3 (Spring 2019) is now available

JML 42.3 (Spring 2019), on the theme "Reading a Century of Affects: From Modernist Longing to Neoliberal Disgust" is now live on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.42.issue-3 and on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/40682.

Contents

Matthew Clarke
“At the Bottom”: Lytton Strachey and the Sodomitical Archive

Jennifer Spitzer
The Heterodox Psychology and Queer Poetics of Auden in the 1930s

Benjamin Kahan
Sheiks, Sweetbacks, and Harlem Renaissance Sexuality, or the Chauncey Thesis at Twenty-Five

Siobhan Phillips
Intimacy, Epistolarity, and the Work of Queer Mourning in James Schuyler’s Poetry

Patrick Jackson
The Narrative of Grief in Ted Hughes’s Crow

Elizabeth Weston
Resisting Loss: Guilt and Consolation in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Anna Ioanes
Disgust in Silhouette: Toni Morrison, Kara Walker, and the Aesthetics of Violence

Cara L. Lewis
Beholding: Visuality and Postcritical Reading in Ali Smith’s How to be both

Frederick D. King and Alison Lee
Consuming Surfaces: Decadent Aesthetics in The Debt to Pleasure

Alexander Adkins
Neoliberal Disgust in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Scott C. Thompson
The Culture of Excess: A Review of George Cotkin’s Feast of Excess

Works cited in MLA 8th edition

We receive a great deal of submissions with incorrectly formatted citations. JML uses MLA 8th edition, NOT 7th edition, Chicago, APA or any hybrid thereof.

The most thorough primer on MLA 8th edition style is available from Purdue University's Online Writing Lab.

For your convenience, we offer sample citations from some of our published essays to help you better see how to correctly format your citations.

Periodicals in MLA 8th edition

Scholarly journal essay
O'Brien, Valerie. “‘A Genius for Unreality’: Neurodiversity in Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, Winter 2019, pp. 75-93.

Book review
Furbank, P.N. “No One Is Incapable of Boiling a Kettle.” Review of Eva Trout, by Elizabeth Bowen. The Times, 25 Jan. 1969, pp. 22.

Online periodical
Yezzi, David. "These Are the Poems, Folks: On the Relationship between Poetry and Joke-telling." Contemporary Poetry Review, 12 October 2011. www.cprw.com/these-are-the-poems-folks-on-the-relationship-between-poetry-and-joke-telling-by-david-yezzi. Accessed 1 June 2019.

Dictionary entry
“lacuna, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford UP, 2016. Accessed 6 June 2016.


Books in MLA 8th edition

Original texts
Ellmann, Maud. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page. Edinburgh UP, 2003.

(Note our house style to abbreviate "University Press" as UP. The same idea applies when the words are in a different order: U of Chicago P.)

Multi-author
Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives. St. Martin’s, 1995.

Republications
Bowen, Elizabeth. Eva Trout. 1968. Anchor Books, 2003.

Multiple books by same author
Bowen, Elizabeth. Eva Trout. 1968. Anchor Books, 2003.
---. “How to Be Yourself—But Not Eccentric.” 1956. People, Places, pp. 412-16.
---. People, Places, Things. Edited by Allan Hepburn. Edinburgh UP, 2008.
---. “The Thread of Dreams.” 1969. People, Places, pp. 416-17.

(Note the use of three hyphens NOT dashes or underlining. Note the ordering by title NOT date. Note also the two cross-referenced essays from a collection.)

Single-author works with other contributors
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boudas. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Columbia UP, 1990.

(Note the periods and capitalizations.)

Multi-author collections
Walshe, Eibhear, editor. Elizabeth Bowen. Irish Academic P, 2009.

Essays in collections
O’Toole, Tina. “Angels and Monsters: Embodiment and Desire in Eva Trout.” Elizabeth Bowen, edited by Eibhear Walshe. Irish Academic P, 2009, pp. 162-78.

(Note comma and use of lowercase "edited" for collections. Note our house style places a period before the publisher, no matter what precedes it.)

Essays in collections that have been already cited (cross reference citation)
O’Toole, Tina. “Angels and Monsters: Embodiment and Desire in Eva Trout.” Walshe, pp. 162-78.

Conference presentations
Valente, Joseph. “Is the Au in Autism the Same as the Au in Autonomy?” Modern Language Association Convention. Chicago. 9-12 Jan. 2014.

Archival documents
Oppen, George. Letter to Ezra Pound. 1 May 1930. Louis Zukofsky’s Papers. TXRC98-A11 Box 33, Folder 7. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Brief hiatus for submissions

JML will not be processing new submissions received after 11 a.m. EDT on May 16 through May 22, due to staff vacation. 

We recommend that you delay submissions until after that time period.

A Closer look at JML 42.2: Brave New Worlds of Birth Control

Now on the IU Press blog, JML author Julia Chan gives background on her essay from the Winter 2019 issue, "The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control: Women’s Travel in Soviet Russia and Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned." She considers women's political pilgrimages to Soviet Russia and how these women viewed the Bolshevik ideal of female empowerment and emancipation that is simultaneously there and not quite there.

Read it HERE.

Erratum: "The Walls that Emancipate" in JML 42.1

In Sheheryar B. Sheikh's essay “The Walls that Emancipate: Disambiguation of the Room in A Room of One's Own“ (JML 42.1, pp. 19-31), on page 27, the author’s name for the source  “Locating Sites of Negations and Denegating ‘Negative Essentializing’: Rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own” is misspelled and incorrect pronouns are used. The correct spelling is Manahari Adhikari, who is male.

The corrected sentence should say:

Woolf’s idea is a natural extension of Coleridge’s idea, as Manahari Adhikari argues in his essay “Locating Sites of Negations and Denegating ‘Negative Essentializing’: Rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own”:  

Shame’s Voices in Shelly Brivic’s Stealing: A Novel in Dreams

By Janina Levin

The stereotype that literary critics write bad novels does not apply to Joyce critic and JML advisory editor Shelly Brivic, who just published his first work of literary fiction, Stealing: A Novel in Dreams, after a fifty-plus year career in academia. Both the critical and the creative force of these years enabled him to develop the subject of human freedom through the medium of art while transcending literary criticism’s trends and fads. A sampling of his titles from 1985 to 2017 shows how his thinking would link art with revolution more and more strongly, moving from Joyce the Creator (1985) to Tears of Rage (2008) and Revolutionary Damnation (2017). Although Brivic is well known for having engaged the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan for a good part of his career, and although he has written two book-length treatments linking Lacanian themes to the works of James Joyce (Veil of Signs in 1991 and Joyce through Lacan and Zizek in 2008), these are not arcane analyses, and they are still in print. His engagement with Lacan has honed his understanding of the psychological struggles of ordinary people. I first heard him talk about the novel in his graduate seminar on Joyce in 2001, and was struck by his ability to move easily from criticism to the stuff of life that fuels good art and good criticism.

 Stealing can be read as a realistic novel about a dysfunctional family and as a work of experimental fiction in the modernist tradition, elevating the trials of ordinary people into a narrative about freedom and consciousness through art. Its realist narrative offers a familiar portrait of eastern European Jewish immigrants – the parents with their mishegas overfeeding and overvaluing their only asset – their kids. Readers will recognize these ambitious kids burdened with their parents’ high hopes in many post-war Jewish novels.

 The novel opens with an ordinary dinner in the Glogover family home. The mom, Judith, peels carrots onto old newspaper in the kitchen sink while talking to her dead sister in Yiddish about her “mismarriage” (1). She thinks her sons don’t understand her plaints, but they do. Her husband Joel enters the scene after a hard day’s work ready for a fight, accusing her – and the two sons she uses as both a solace and a weapon – of being in “cahoots” to destroy his authority (8). The family row that follows is both typical and highly individualized. It is a scene of mundane domestic misery: the older brother defends the mom and stalks out, the parents pick at each others’ faults, the younger brother tries to negotiate the ruckus. Yet the voice of each family member expresses an individual version of what David Foster Wallace has called “the day to day trenches of existence,” without anyone stealing the show. It’s a family chorus of misery and misunderstanding.

 The narrative follows the different fates of the two sensitive sons, Ira and Marc, who struggle to come to grips with their difficult upbringing. Ira’s is a story of a troubled downward path toward suicide. Marc’s, on the other hand, is more difficult to define in a single narrative strand, since he often holds, in his mind, the double voice of Ira and Marc as an entity itself. But Marc’s story does approach a wisdom narrative by way of a study of Western literature. You don’t have to be Jewish or have grown up in mid-twentieth century America to sympathize with Ira’s rages or Marc’s quest for meaning through psychoanalysis and literature. Stealing explores the way the dead haunt the living in families dealing with suicide, thus contributing to a larger conversation in contemporary fiction about this mental health epidemic. Yet while Stealing offers a thoughtful reflection on the motives of Ira’s suicide and its effects on his family, the novel strives to go beyond considering grief coping strategies, for it also uses experimental techniques. The novel focuses more on what Brivic considers core thematic concerns of modernism, themes that he tackled repeatedly during his career as a literary critic.

 Although both Ira and Marc aspire to become writers, and only one of them reaches this goal, Stealing is not Marc’s story but encompasses both brothers’ voices. Brivic accomplishes this through an experimental technique of presenting about 1/3 of the story in two columns, the left column for Ira and the right one for Marc, a technique that appropriately tracks Ira and Marc’s lived experiences and their intimacy. Although using two columns in a narrative does pose technical difficulties, a second reading gives a sense that as you are obliged to go back and flip the pages to compare Marc’s life with Ira’s, you are returning to the same moment in time that made both brothers suffer such different fates.

Shame—a topic Brivic explores in depth in “Ulysses’ ‘Circe’: Dealing in Shame” (2008)—is also an important theme in his novel, one that structures the entire plot of Stealing. The Glogover family is saturated with typical sources of shame: dirt, cheapness, excretion (the book revels in bathroom humor). The parents reflect the way shame and pride are often distributed along gender lines (“Dealing in Shame” 146). Judith is “shame’s voice,” a voice historically associated with femininity (143). She represents shame as the internal dissatisfactions of the self, linked to how people are kept in their place and stay there, believing they deserve their fate (143). Joel reflects how men hide their shame by reversing it, becoming proud of what would normally be devalued. In the opening chapter, Judith associates her husband with “the wrong end.” Ira remembers him singing in the bathroom, his voice mixing with his farts (Stealing 5). Ira later recalls being forced to witness his father giving himself an enema: “This was the first time I was upset by a rear end. I was told that I should be man enough to accept it” (115).

Brivic has stated that “shame is where the action is” in modern literature, since shame exposes and modernism lays bare structures of power to clear a path and begin anew (“Dealing in Shame” 144). In a critical discussion of Joyce’s Ulysses, Brivic summed up the affective resonance of the book by noting “In most situations in life, people strive to avoid shame and maintain pride…. Joyce as an artist reverses these strivings” (144). This same reversal is at the core of Stealing. But the book’s focus on shame is not a simple reversal, like the father’s bullying, making his sons figuratively eat his shit/shame. Shame in Stealing becomes cathartic because it gives characters the ability to see beyond their current situation. In a climactic scene, after Ira returns home from a mental hospital and refuses any of the food his parents give him, the whole family suddenly breaks down in tears, starting with the father, Joel, who finds himself unable to complain that his eldest son is a waste of resources. Ira’s illness is bigger than all of them, and their collective crying accomplishes a powerful leveling: “They all had an inkling that their problems would’ve been solved if only they could have gone on crying forever” (133). The father’s shame initiates a chain reaction, emptying out all that is inessential. As Brivic suggests, refusing shame as unbearable and masking it with pride leads to paralysis; shame should carve a space for change (“Dealing in Shame” 157).

 One can see the two brothers moving along the gender lines of shame. Ira follows the father in finding shame unbearable; the time period leading up to his suicide portrays the awfulness of being a family burden. Marc, like his mother, learns to compromise and develops a tolerance for all the abuse he encountered at home. As he gets older, he even begins to understand how much his parents enjoy taunting each other. But as Brivic has argued, the opposition between shame and pride along gender lines blurs the route to freedom; historically, we have witnessed a deeper level of understanding in the realms of art and religion, which favor abjection of the self via shame, cultivating a practice of self-emptying that cleanses the self rather than divides it along gender lines (“Dealing in Shame” 145). Stealing favors art as the medium that accomplishes this cleansing.

Works Cited 

Brivic, Shelly. Stealing: A Novel in Dreams. Frayed Edge Press, 2018.

---. “Ulysses’ ‘Circe’: Dealing in Shame.” Joyce Through Lacan and Žižek. Palgrave, 2008, pp. 143-160.

Wallace, David Foster. “This is Water: Commencement Speech (2005).” YouTube, 19 May 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

 ---

Janina Levin is a lecturer at University of the Sciences, Department of Writing and Rhetoric.

A Closer Look at JML 42.2: Eva Trout and neurodiversity

Now on the IU Press blog, JML author Valerie O'Brien gives background on her essay from the Winter 2019 issue, "'A Genius for Unreality': Neurodiversity in Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout." She discusses how using neurotypical capacities to define personhood distorts and neglects the complex interior lives of neurodivergent subjects.

Read it HERE.

Winter 2019 issue is live!

JML 42.2 (Winter 2019), a Special Issue on the theme "Varieties of Embodiment: Whose Body?" is now available online at JSTOR and Project Muse.

Contents:

Eric Sandberg
“The Body in the Bath”: Dorothy L. Sayers's Whose Body? and Embodied Detective Fiction (pp. 1-20)

Sarah Kingston
“Great Sleepless Artists”: Humbert Humbert's Insomnias in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (pp. 21-37)

Julia Chan
The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control: Women's Travel in Soviet Russia and Naomi Mitchison's We Have Been Warned (pp. 38-56)
READ FOR FREE!

Greg Kinzer
“Throat in Hand”: Myung Mi Kim's Poetics of the Physical (pp. 57-74)

Valerie O'Brien
“A Genius for Unreality”: Neurodiversity in Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout (pp. 75-93)
READ FOR FREE!

Rebecah Pulsifer
“Contemplating the idiot” in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (pp. 94-112)

Joshua R. Galat
Modernism, Mental Hygiene, and the Embodiment of Mental Disability (pp. 113-131)

Hannah Simpson
Kinesthetic Empathy, Physical Recoil: The Conflicting Embodied Affects of Samuel Beckett's Quad (pp. 132-148)

Imola Nagy-Seres
Malleable Sculptures in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room and Early Travel Diaries (pp. 149-166)

Lillian Hingley
The Failed-Escape Artist: Kafka, Houdini and “In the Penal Colony” (pp. 167-184)


Book Reviews
Narrative Strategies and Fictional Intellectual Disabilities (pp. 185-191)
The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read by Michael Bérubé
Review by: Michael Patrick Hart

“A spectacle and nothing strange”: Rebecca Sanchez's Deafening Modernism (pp. 192-197)
Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature by Rebecca Sanchez
Review by: Caiden Feldmiller

Normativity and the Modernist Bodymind (pp. 198-200)
Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature by Maren Tova Linett
Review by: Rebecca Sanchez

A Fragmentary Illness (pp. 201-205)
Unica Zürn: Art, Writing and Postwar Surrealism by Esra Plumer
Review by: Charles Clements