Book News: Sexual policing in Hemispheric American Literature

Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature

BY JENNA GRACE SCIUTO

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN 9781496833440 Hardcover

ISBN 9781496833457 Paperback

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Policing-Intimacy

In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations.

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.

A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.

Jenna Grace Sciuto is associate professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her work examines the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in circum-Caribbean literature.

Book News: Paris's Postwar Shadows

Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing

EDITED BY SARA R. HOROWITZ, AMIRA BOJADZIJA-DAN, AND JULIA CREET

 

SUNY Press, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8174-6 Paper

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8173-9 Hardcover

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6980-shadows-in-the-city-of-light.aspx

The essays in Shadows in the City of Light explore the significance of Paris in the writing of five influential French writers—Sarah Kofman, Patrick Modiano, George Perec, Henri Raczymow, and Irene Nemirovsky—whose novels and memoirs capture and probe the absences of deported Paris Jews. These writers move their readers through wartime and postwar cityscapes of Paris, walking them through streets and arrondissments where Jews once resided, looking for traces of the disappeared. The city functions as more than a backdrop or setting. Its streets and buildings and monuments remind us of the exhilarating promise of the French Revolution and what it meant for Jews dreaming of equality. But the dynamic space of Paris also reminds us of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The shadowed paths traced by these writers raise complicated questions about ambivalence, absence, memory, secularity, and citizenship. In their writing, the urban landscape itself bears witness to the absent Jews, and what happened to them.

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.

For the writers treated in this volume, neither their Frenchness nor their Jewishness is a fixed point. Focusing on Paris’s dual role as both a cultural hub and a powerful symbol of hope and conflict in Jewish memory, the contributors address intersections and departures among these writers. Their complexity of thought, artistry, and depth of vision shape a new understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish and French identity, on literature and literary forms, and on the development of Jewish secular culture in Western Europe.

Sara R. Horowitz is professor of humanities and comparative literature at York University and the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, also published by SUNY Press. 

Amira Bojadzija-Dan is research associate at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. 

Julia Creet is professor of English at York University and the author of The Genealogical Sublime. 

Together, they are also coeditors of H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy.

Book News: Vertical ascension and growing anxiety in 20th century literature

 The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism

BY PAUL HAACKE

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780198851448 hardback

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-vertical-imagination-and-the-crisis-of-transatlantic-modernism-9780198851448?cc=us&lang=en&#

From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history.

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.

This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as direct indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of "high" and "low."

• Rethinks modernist discourse from the rise of the twentieth century to the post-1945 and post-9/11 periods
• Shows how technologies, ideologies, and metaphors of verticality became central for re-envisioning the meaning of modernity
• Develops a comparative approach to major and lesser-known works of European and American literature as well as intellectual and cultural history, architecture, and film
• Engages with inter-disciplinary work in critical theory, urban and environmental studies, film and media studies, transnationalism and empire, and new materialisms and secularisms
• Studies a wide range of authors including Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Aimé Césaire, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko

Paul Haacke has taught at UC Berkeley, New York University, and the Pratt Institute. His academic writing has appeared in a range of publications, including diacritics, French Forum, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Book News: Odysseys in Global Modernism

Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection

BY MICHELLE ZERBA

Ohio State UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1464-0 Hardback

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214640.html

Michelle Zerba’s Modern Odysseys explores three major writers in global modernism from the Mediterranean, Anglo-European Britain, and the Caribbean whose groundbreaking literary works have never been studied together before. Using language as an instrument of revolution and social change, C. P. Cavafy, Virginia Woolf, and Aimé Césaire gave expression to the forms of human experience we now associate with modernity: homoeroticism, transsexuality, and racial consciousness. More specifically, Zerba argues that Odyssean tropes of diffusion, isolation, passage, and return give form to works by these writers but in ways that invite us to reconsider and revise the basic premises of reception studies and intellectual history.

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.

Combining close readings of literary texts with the study of interviews, essays, diaries, and letters, Zerba advances a revisionary account of how to approach relationships between antiquity and modernity. Instead of frontal encounters with the Odyssey, Cavafy, Woolf, and Césaire indirectly—but no less significantly—engage with Homer’s epic poem. In demonstrating how such encounters operate, Modern Odysseys explores issues of race and sexuality that connect antiquity with the modern period.

“In addition to being riveting to read, Modern Odysseys offers readers a compelling new framework for thinking about the emergence of counter subjectivities within international modernism and enlivens scholarly debates about the modern afterlives of Homer’s Odyssey. The author’s intellectual flair, theoretical verve, and impressive range all command attention.” —Emily Greenwood, author of Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

“The book’s distinctiveness and charm are enhanced by the author’s clarity and usefulness. Modern Odysseys makes a valuable intervention in the popular subfield of reception studies within classics.” —Alexander Beecroft, author of Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation

Michelle Zerba is the Maggie B. Martin Professor of Rhetoric and Classical Studies at Louisiana State University.

Book News: First collection of interviews with poet Dana Gioia

Conversations with Dana Gioia

EDITED BY JOHN ZHENG

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4968-3204-7 Paper

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Dana-Gioia

“Like all art, poetry makes us more alert and attentive to the mystery of our own lives.”  --Dana Gioia

Conversations with Dana Gioia is the first collection of interviews with the internationally known poet and public intellectual, covering every stage of his busy, polymathic career. Dana Gioia (b. 1950) has made many contributions to contemporary American literature and culture, including but not limited to crafting a personal poetic style suited to the age; leading the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative through New Formalism; walloping the “intellectual ghetto” of American poetry through his epochal article “Can Poetry Matter?”; helping American poetry move forward by organizing influential conferences; providing public service and initiating nationwide arts projects such as Poetry Out Loud through his leadership of the National Endowment for the Arts; and editing twenty best-selling literary anthologies widely used in American classrooms.

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.

Taken together, the twenty-two collected interviews increase our understanding of Gioia’s poetry and poetics, offer aesthetic pleasure in themselves, and provide a personal encounter with a writer who has made poetry matter. The book presents the actual voice of Dana Gioia, who speaks of his personal and creative life and articulates his unique vision of American culture and poetry.

"Conversations with Dana Gioia is an extraordinary book, one that serves as a sort of instant autobiography of Gioia. It is as evocative and fascinating as the only comparable book by and about a poet of which I am aware: Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O’Driscoll (2008).... In addition to the twenty-two interviews reprinted in the book, Conversations with Dana Gioia contains three valuable research tools: the most elaborate list of works by Gioia that I have seen anywhere, a major bibliography of works about Gioia, and a chronology of his life to date. The result is an extraordinary book full of human interest and historic value." -- Carl Jenks, Poetry Corner

JOHN ZHENG is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University and editor of Conversations with Sterling Plumpp; The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku; and African American Haiku: Cultural Visions; as well as coeditor (with Biling Chen) of Conversations with Gish Jen, all published by University Press of Mississippi. His work has also been published in such journals as African American Review, East-West Connections, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, Paideuma, and Southern Quarterly.