Book News: Prizewinning poet and his publisher

 John Berryman and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Friendship

BY PATRICK SAMWAY S.J.

University of Notre Dame Press, October 2020

Hardcover ISBN 9780268108410

https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268108410/john-berryman-and-robert-giroux/

This engaging study provides new perspectives on the lives and work of two major figures in American poetry and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century: Robert Giroux (1914–2008), editor-in-chief of Harcourt, Brace and Company and later of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and John Berryman (1914–1972), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and Shakespearean scholar who also received a National Book Award and a Bollingen Prize for Poetry. From their first meeting as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the early 1930s, Giroux and Berryman became lifelong friends and publishing partners. Patrick Samway received unprecedented access to Giroux’s letters and essays. By incorporating either sections or whole letters of the correspondence between Berryman and Giroux into this book, Samway makes available for the first time a historical account of their relationship, including revealing portraits of their personal lives.

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.

As Giroux edited over a dozen books by Berryman, his letters to the poet were often filled with editorial details and pertinent observations, emanating from his genuine affection for his friend, whose talent he never doubted, even as Berryman endured prolonged periods of hospitalization due to his alcoholism. Giroux gave Berryman the greatest gift he could: sustained encouragement to continue writing without trying to manipulate or discourage him in any way. But Giroux also had a deep-seated secret desire to surpass the essays written about Shakespeare by Berryman, as well as the book on Shakespeare written by their mutual professor Mark Van Doren. Giroux’s volume, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was finally published in 1982. Samway’s fascinating account of a gifted but troubled poet and his devoted yet conflicted editor will interest fans of Berryman and all readers and students of American poetry.

"Samway . . . charts in this revelatory literary study the close relationship between John Berryman and Robert Giroux. . . . Promising to show 'one of the most extraordinary personal and professional relationships in the history of American poetry,' Samway succeeds with a work both definitive and effortlessly readable." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A fascinating, in-depth analysis of the editor who saw Berryman through the publication of all of his major works.” —Paul Mariani, author of Dream Song

“The new insights gained from bringing Giroux into play are genuinely significant. The illumination of the mid-century literary publishing scene, far beyond Giroux’s involvement with Berryman, is revelatory.” —Peter Maber, author of William Marshall

Patrick Samway, S.J., professor emeritus of English at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, is the author or editor/co-editor of fifteen books, including The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton (2015) and Flannery O’Connor and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Partnership (2018), both published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Book News: Restoring the radical potential of dialogue

Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent

By JUAN MENESES

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0676-4 

Cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-0675-7 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/resisting-dialogue

Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address.

Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works expose the pitfalls of other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene.  

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.

Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics. 

Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity.

— Grant Farred, Cornell University

Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quo—these immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political.

— Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic

Juan Meneses is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Book News: Poetry, a laughing matter?

Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America

BY CALISTA MCRAE

Cornell University Press, October 2020

Hardback ISBN: 9781501750977

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750977/lyric-as-comedy/#bookTabs=1

A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn.

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.

Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging.

The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

"This is an immensely pleasurable book to read. McRae is a beautiful reader of poetry, and her attention to form and her serious thinking through of her material is evident on every page. I cannot overstate the quality of McRae's subtle way of reading."

--Gillian White, University of Michigan, author of Lyric Shame

"Calista McRae wittily and incisively examines how the inwardness and embarrassment of mid-century lyric resembles the abjection of stand-up comedy. A tightly-argued, beautifully written book, Lyric as Comedy reveals the complexity and slipperiness of the speaking 'I' on the page or the stage. McRae shows how pervasive and important comic technique is, even in apparently quite serious poems."

--Rachel Trousdale, Framingham State University, editor of Humor in Modern American Poetry

Calista McRae is Assistant Professor of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Book News: Modernists and Greek Tragedy

Tragedy and the Modernist Novel

BY MANYA LEMPERT
Cambridge University Press, September 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 9781108496025
https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/tragedy-and-modernist-novel?format=HB

This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.

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.

• Explains how modern novelists thought about ancient and modern tragedy
• Unveils the similarities between Greek tragedy and Darwinian evolution
• Explores modernist authors' depictions of nihilism, suicide, and political violence and apathy as cautionary tales for readers today, showing how fiction can endorse and condemn different ethical and political positions

‘This is an extraordinarily erudite book about literary modernism and the relationship between it and the history and theory of tragedy. Lempert's overall discussion of Greek tragedy is absolutely riveting and her close-reading of form is extraordinarily sensitive. Lempert has produced an extraordinarily bold argument that is likely to attract a great deal of attention not only from modernist scholars but from others further afield.' 

--Ato Quayson, Stanford University, California

‘The themes of this book could hardly be more resonant and enduringly relevant to modernist literary studies. This book pits tragedy and modern writing against nihilism – a way of renouncing or not caring about existence – finding a way for moments of light to counter total eclipse of meaning without callow resolution or pat consolation.' 

--Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne

 

Manya Lempert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona. She specializes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, ancient and modern tragedy and philosophy, and theories of evolution.