Book News: The narrowed politics of form in contemporary literature

 Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature

BY MITCHUM HUEHLS

Ohio State UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1524-1

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215241.html

Can form be political? Do specific aesthetic and literary forms necessarily point us toward a progressive or reactionary politics? Artists, authors, and critics like to imagine so, but what happens when they lose control of the politics of their forms? In Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature, Mitchum Huehls argues that art’s interest in revolution did not end with the twentieth century, as some critics would have it, but rather that the relationship between literary forms and politics has been severed, resulting in a twenty-first century investment in forms of generality such as genre, gesture, constructivism, and abstraction. 

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.

Focusing on three particular domains (art, theory, and revolution) in which the relationship between form and politics has collapsed, Huehls shows how twenty-first-century US fiction writers such as Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rachel Kushner, Salvador Plascencia, and Sheila Heti are turning to forms of generality that lead us toward a more modest, ad hoc, context-dependent way to think about the politics of form. The result is the first major study of generality in literature.

“With theoretical capaciousness, thematic timeliness, and rhetorical clarity, Art, Theory, Revolution makes a much-needed intervention into ongoing discussions about fictional realism, historical fiction, and political forms. In this way, Huehls promises to enliven debates about how novels possess their own political agency and contribute aesthetically to the making of theory.” —Alexandra Kingston-Reese, author of Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

“Huehls captures what’s exciting and unique about recent American fiction and remains clear-sighted despite dealing with difficult concepts in aesthetic theory, deconstructive thinking, and the politics of revolution. Art, Theory, Revolution breaks new ground in how we understand cultural production after postmodernism.” —Daniel Grausam, author of On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

Mitchum Huehls is associate professor in the Department of English at UCLA. He is the author of After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age and Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time and co-editor (with Rachel Greenwald Smith) of Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture.

JML 46.1 (Fall 2022) "Literary Ethics, Literary History" is LIVE!

JML 46.1 (Fall 2022) on the theme "Literary Ethics, Literary History" is now available on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48859

Content includes:

David Dwan 

Unlucky Jim: Conrad, Chance, Ethics

FREE!

Shea Hennum 

Reading Borges Ethically

Aubrey Lively 

Ye Shall Bear Witness: An Ethics of Survival in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn 

Maggie Laurel Boyd 

Ordinary Language for Extraordinary Loss

Jack Dudley 

The Secularizing Work of the Novel: Modernist Form and Ian McEwan’s Saturday 

Heather Clark 

The Voice Within: Sylvia Plath’s Juvenilia, 1947-1950 

Johan Adam Warodell 

Reading Conrad’s Unpublished Trilogy: “Youth,” Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim

Howard Fisher 

The Emergence of Resemblances between People: Stein’s Diagrams in The Making of Americans 

Susan Farrell 

American Fascism and the Historical Underpinnings of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night 

FREE!

Walter Kalaidjian 

Occult Surrealism as “Profane Illumination”: Mina Loy, Leonora Carrington, and Ithell Colquhoun

Reviews

Christopher GoGwilt 

“Going Dead Slow”: Joseph Conrad’s Writing the Now, a review of Yael Levin, Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism 

John Zilcosky 

Kafka, or What Does Literature Sound Like? 

Ashley Byczkowski 

Derridean Deconstruction and Modernist Writer-Sons

Ali AlYousefi 

Revitalizing Close Reading

Book News: A deep dive into Virginia Woolf's education

Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist

BY BETH RIGEL DAUGHERTY

Edinburgh UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781399504515

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-virginia-woolf-s-apprenticeship.html

This study takes up Woolf’s challenge to probe the relationship between education and work, specifically her education and her work as an essayist. It expands her education beyond her father’s library to include not only a broader examination of her homeschooling but also her teaching at Morley College and her early book reviewing. It places Virginia Stephen’s learning in the historical and cultural contexts of education for women, the working classes and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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.

Weaving together Virginia Stephen’s homeschooling, her teaching and her writing for the newspapers, Beth Rigel Daugherty demonstrates how these three strands shape Virginia Woolf’s essay persona, her essays, and her relationship with her readers. She also shows why Virginia Stephen’s apprenticeship compels Virginia Woolf to become a pedagogical essayist. The volume publishes two holograph draft lectures by Virginia Stephen for the first time and mines rarely used archival materials. It also includes five appendices, one detailing Virginia Stephen’s library and another her apprenticeship essays.

This is the first in a two-volume study of Virginia Woolf’s essays that analyzes Virginia Stephen’s development and Virginia Woolf’s achievements as an essay writer.

Drawing on deep research into the social history of women’s lives and of education, Daugherty shows with superb attention to detail how Virginia Stephen’s early experiences of teaching and of being taught nourished the seeds that flowered as Virginia Woolf, "an essayist compelled to teach." This is impeccable and important scholarship. -– Mark Hussey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Pace University

This electrifying magnum opus illuminates Virginia Woolf’s formative experience of teaching working-class adult students while starting her own career as a freelance book reviewer. Beth Rigel Daugherty shows how helping and identifying with novice learners influenced Woolf’s nonfiction aesthetic. Over many subsequent years, Woolf made a striking attempt to write essays in ways that would welcome ordinary readers.

Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship launches a new era in the way Woolf is assessed and will stimulate scholars, teachers, and writers in the broad and burgeoning genre of creative nonfiction. Deeply researched historically and biographically, it contributes beyond Woolf studies to the fields of memoir, personal essay, journalism, and pedagogy. Warm of manner and lively of style, it has a bold and ambitious purpose: to help us see Virginia Woolf anew as a working, learning, growing person and writer. Woolf emerges as someone deeply concerned with connecting with others regardless of their class and gender, thereby attempting to transcend the limits of her family, her heritage, and her time. Showing this is the book’s larger, remarkable achievement. – Richard Gilbert, MFA, nonfiction author, teacher, and publisher

Recently retired from Otterbein University in Ohio, Beth Rigel Daugherty taught modernist English literature, Virginia Woolf and Appalachian and Native American literature along with many thematically focused writing courses for 36 years. Falling in love with Virginia Woolf and her essays while at Rice University, she has been presenting and publishing on both ever since with peer-reviewed articles in edited collections; editions of the “How Should Read a Book?” holograph draft and Woolf’s fan letters in Woolf Studies Annual; and, with Mary Beth Pringle, the Modern Language Association teaching volume on To the Lighthouse.

Book News: Affinities of affect in Lear, Eliot, and Smith

Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith

BY JASMINE JAGGER

Oxford UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780198868804

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rhythms-of-feeling-in-edward-lear-t-s-eliot-and-stevie-smith-9780198868804

Rich with unpublished material and detailed insight, Rhythms of Feeling offers a new reading of three of the most celebrated poets: Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. Tracing exciting lines of interplay, affinity, and influence between these writers for the first time, the book shifts the terms of critical debate on Lear, Eliot, and Smith and subtly reorients the traditional account of the genealogies of literary 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.

Going beyond a biographically-framed close reading or a more general analysis framed by affect theory, the volume traces these poets' "affective rhythms" (fits, tears, nerves) to consider the way that poetics, the mental and physical process of writing and reading, and the ebbs and flows of their emotional weather might be in dialogue. Attentive, acute, and often forensic, the book broadens its reach to contemporary writers and medical accounts of creativity and cognition. Alongside deep critical study, this volume seeks to bring emotional intelligence to criticism, finding ways of speaking lucidly and humanely about emotional and physical states that defy lucidity and stretch our sense of the human.

• Studies affect and emotion in the poetry of Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith
• Presents an innovative new reading of poetic form
• Uses previously neglected archival materials to cast new light on each writer
• Combines analysis of textual and visual form to draw exciting new parallels between lines written and drawn by the poetic imagination

Jasmine Jagger is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Roehampton. She has published articles in Victorian Poetry, Romanticism, Literary Imagination, The Cambridge Quarterly, Apollo, and The Carrollian.

Book News: Transatlantic view of Eudora Welty

The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty

By DANIELE PITVAY-SOUQUES 

EDITED BY PEARL AMELIA MCHANEY

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN 978-1-4968-4058-5

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Eye-That-Is-Language

Danièle Pitavy-Souques (1937–2019) was a European powerhouse of Welty studies. In this collection of essays, Pitavy-Souques pours new light on Welty’s view of the world and her international literary import, challenging previous readings of Welty’s fiction, memoir, and photographs in illuminating ways. The nine essays collected here offer scholars, critics, and avid readers a new understanding and enjoyment of Welty’s work. The volume explores beloved stories in Welty’s masterpiece The Golden Apples, as well as “A Curtain of Green,” “Flowers for Marjorie,” “Old Mr. Marblehall,” “A Still Moment,” “Livvie,” “Circe,” “Kin,” and The Optimist’s Daughter, One Writer’s Beginnings, and One Time, One Place. Essays include “Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples” (1979), “A Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty” (1987), and others written between 2000 and 2018. Together, they reveal and explain Welty’s brilliance for employing the particular to discover the universal.

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.

Pitavy-Souques, who briefly lived in and often revisited the South, met with Welty several times in her Jackson, Mississippi, home. Her readings draw on the visual arts, European theorists, and styles of modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, as well as the baroque and the gothic. The included essays reflect Pitavy-Souques’s European education, her sophisticated understanding of intellectual theories and artistic movements abroad, and her passion for the literary achievement of women of genius. The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty reveals the way in which Welty’s narrative techniques broaden her work beyond southern myths and mysteries into a global perspective of humanity.

"These readings of Welty’s works provide a coherent and significant picture of Welty as a modernist writer who was not just of her time but ahead of her time. By placing Welty’s work in the context of twentieth-century philosophers, scientists, and artists, Danièle Pitavy-Souques will give readers a renewed appreciation for Welty’s work and firmly position Welty as a major force in the literary canon." --Sarah Gilbreath Ford, author of Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic

Danièle Pitavy-Souques (1937–2019) was professor emerita at the University of Burgundy, France; a recipient of the Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award and the French Legion of Honor for her work on international women's rights; and a European powerhouse of Welty studies. She published two books and more than a dozen essays on Welty, and she made major contributions to southern and Canadian studies.

Pearl Amelia McHaney is Kenneth M. England Professor of Southern Literature Emerita at Georgia State University and a recipient of the Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award for outstanding achievement in Welty studies. She is author of A Tyrannous Eye: Eudora Welty’s Nonfiction and Photography and editor of Eudora Welty as Photographer, Occasions: Selected Writings by Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews, and A Writer’s Eye: Collected Reviews, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book News: Risk as the crux of theatre

When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays

BY EDWIN WONG

Friesen Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-03-913509-3 

https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000213016212/Edwin-Wong%2C-Gabriel-Jason-Dean-and-Nicholas-Dunn-%26-Emily-McClain-When-Life-Gives-You-Risk%2C-Make-Risk-Theatre

Wong’s first book upended tragic literary theory by arguing that risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the action. It also launched an international playwriting competition (risktheatre.com). His second book expands on how chance directs the action, both on and off the stage.

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.

Inside you will find three risk theatre tragedies by acclaimed playwrights: In Bloom (Gabriel Jason Dean), The Value (Nicholas Dunn), and Children of Combs and Watch Chains (Emily McClain). From the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the motel rooms and doctors’ offices lining interstate expressways, these plays, by simulating risk, show how theatre is a dress rehearsal for life.

Six risk theatre essays round off this volume. In a dazzling display from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Miller, Wong reinterprets theatre through chance and probability theory. After risk theatre, you will never look at literature in the same way.

Edwin Wong is a classicist and theatre researcher specializing in the impact of the highly improbable. He has been invited to talk at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra in Portugal to international conferences held by the National New Play Network, the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, the Society of Classical Studies, and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. His first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, is igniting an international arts movement. He was educated at Brown University and lives in Victoria, Canada.

Book News: Poetic justice in modern Ireland

Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland

BY ADAM HANNA 

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815637615

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/4769/poetry-politics-and-the-law-in-modern-ireland/

A compelling look at the role of legal developments and controversies in shaping modern Irish poetry.

Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland is a richly detailed exploration of how modern Irish poetry has been shaped by, and responded to, the laws, judgments, and constitutions of both of the island’s jurisdictions. Focusing on poets’ responses in their writing to such contentious legal issues as partition, censorship, paramilitarism, and the curtailment of women’s reproductive and other rights, this monograph is the first in the growing field of law and literature to focus exclusively on modern Ireland. Hanna unpacks the legal engagements of both major and non-canonical poets from every decade between the 1920s and the present day, including Rhoda Coghill, Austin Clarke, Paul Durcan, Elaine Feeney, Miriam Gamble, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan, Julie Morrissy, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and W. B. Yeats.

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.

Poetry from the time of independence onwardhas been shaped by two opposing forces. On the one hand, the Irish public has traditionally had strong expectations that poets offer a dissenting counter-discourse to official sources of law. On the other hand, poets have more recently expressed skepticism about the ethics of speaking for others and about the adequacy of art in performing a public role. Hanna’s fascinating study illuminates the poetry that arises from these antithetical modern conditions.

"I was hooked from the word go . . . . this pioneering book develops a strong case for the engagement of poetry and law in Ireland. It opens up in a genuinely original and intellectually nuanced way the resonant overlap between legal, constitutional and ethical concerns in Irish poetry since Yeats."—Hugh Haughton, Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literatures at the University of York

"Poetry, Politics, and Law in Modern Ireland is a major achievement. Combining the rigours of quite brilliant close readings with an attention to the various legal and extra-legal contexts that help shape the work of Ireland's modern poets, Hanna reveals the jurisprudential unconscious of the literary and the cultural after-life of the law."—Eugene McNulty, Dublin City University

"This is a book about poetic justice itself, about how the acknowledged legislations of poetry act as conscience and arbitrator for the failings of laws—and their inevitable repeal. Hanna's scholarship has an ambition of breadth and reach that means it should be read by lawyers, historians and political scientists—but above all it should be read by poets and their readers, as an argument for the seriousness of Irish poetic engagement with the laws of the country, South and North."—Matthew Campbell, University of York

Adam Hanna is a lecturer in the English Department at University College Cork. He is the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space and the coeditor of Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Art and Literature from Classical to Contemporary and Law and Literature: The Irish Case.

Book News: Children in hemispheric American Gothic fiction

Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas

BY SUZANNE MANIZZA ROSZAK 

University of Wales Press, 2022

ISBN: 9781786838667

https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/uncanny-youth/

A literary study of childhood in the American Gothic. 

Childhood in Gothic literature has often served colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal ideologies, but in Uncanny Youth, Suzanne Manizza Roszak highlights hemispheric American writers who subvert these scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Tracey Baptiste, Gothic conventions critique systems of power in the Americas. As fictional children confront shifting configurations of imperialism and patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, their uncanny stories call on readers to reckon with intersecting forms of injustice.

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.

‘Mining an impressive array of Gothic texts – including novels, short stories, plays, and literature written for young adult audiences – Uncanny Youth deftly argues for the subversive and revolutionary power of child and teen characters who confront (and only sometimes survive) the devastating impacts of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide.’ --Bridget M. Marshall, associate professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Suzanne Manizza Roszak is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Book News: Woolf's invocation of Greek mythology

Virginia Woolf's Mythic Method

BY AMY C. SMITH

Ohio State UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1513-5

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215135.html

In Virginia Woolf’s Mythic Method, Smith reinvigorates scholarly analysis of myth in Virginia Woolf’s fiction by examining how Woolf engaged social and political issues in her work. Through close readings of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts, Smith argues that Woolf develops a paratactic method of alluding to Greek myth that is shaped by the style of archaic oral literature and her intersectional feminist insights. By revising such famously paradoxical figures as the Great Goddess, the Eleusinian deities, Dionysus, Odysseus, and the Sirens, Woolf illustrates the links between epistemological and metaphysical assumptions and war, empire, patriarchy, capitalism, and fascism.

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.

At the same time, her use of parataxis to invoke ancient myth unsettles authorial control and empowers readers to participate in making meaning out of her juxtaposed fragments. In contrast to T. S. Eliot’s more prominent mythic method, which seeks to control the anarchy of modern life, Woolf’s paratactic method envisions more livable forms of sociality by destabilizing meaning in her novels, an agenda that aligns better with our contemporary understandings of modernism.

“Virginia Woolf’s Mythic Method is a fresh, nuanced, and innovative examination of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts viewed through the dual lenses of myth and modernism. Smith’s richly layered analysis and excellent scholarly sources position this book to shape future interpretations of Woolf’s work.”     —Vara Neverow, editor of Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Amy C. Smith is associate professor of English at Lamar University.

Howe It Is: A Closer Look at JML 45.4

 

Take a closer look at JML 45.4. Author Stefania Heim shares how an interview with Susan Howe in 2011 began her journey toward her current research in THIS POST for the Indiana University Press blog. 

Her essay, “‘I for i and i for I’: Susan Howe’s That This and the Relational Self” is now available for FREE on Project Muse.

JML 45.4 (Summer 2022) "The Matter of Poetry" is LIVE!

JML 45.4 (Summer 2022) on the theme "The Matter of Poetry" is now available on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48858.

Content includes:

Modernist renegotiations 

Espen Grønlie

Linguistic Relativism and Poetry: Ezra Pound’s Reading of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl as a Key to Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry

Tiao Wang and Ronald Schleifer

Ezra Pound and Mang Ke (芒克): Image, Affect, and Consumerism in Western and Chinese Modernism

Joseph Pizza

“All Aboard for Natchez, Cairo, and St. Louis”: Minstrelsy and Conversion in T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday

Nathaniel Mills

John Berryman’s Blackface Jokes: The Insights of Literary Failure 

Harold Schweizer

On Gentleness: Rilke’s Hands

Tradition, lamentation, and individual talent

Wit Pietrzak

“Her songs are raised like fists”: The Caoineadh Tradition in Paul Muldoon’s Lamentations 

Dalia Bolotnikov Mazur

Charles Reznikoff's Testimony of the Dead

Stefania Heim

“I for i and i for I”: Susan Howe’s That This and the Relational Self 

FREE

Marty Cain

Frank Stanford’s Rural Avant-Garde: Infrastructure, Mediation, and Poetic Community

Nate Mickelson

Composing in the Future Particular: Reading CAConrad’s (Soma)tics

Review

Stefania Heim

The Matter of Poetry 

Book News: creative women of the Iranian diaspora

 Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora

BY MEHRANEH EBRAHIMI

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815636557

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/104/women-art-and-literature-in-the-iranian-diaspora/

Does the study of aesthetics have tangible effects in the real world? Does examining the work of diaspora writers and artists change our view of “the Other”? In this thoughtful book, Ebrahimi argues that an education in the humanities is as essential as one in politics and ethics, critically training the imagination toward greater empathy. Despite the surge in Iranian memoirs, their contributions to debunking an abstract idea of terror and their role in encouraging democratic thinking remain understudied. In examining creative work by women of Iranian descent, Ebrahimi argues that Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, and Parsua Bashi make the Other familiar and break a cycle of reactionary xenophobia. These authors, instead of relying on indignation, build imaginative bridges in their work that make it impossible to blame one evil, external enemy. Ebrahimi explores both classic and hybrid art forms, including graphic novels and photo-poetry, to advocate for the importance of aesthetics to inform and influence a global community. Drawing on the theories of Rancière, Butler, Arendt, and Levinas, Ebrahimi identifies the ways in which these works give a human face to the Other, creating the space and language to imagine a new political and ethical landscape.

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 is an ambitious, sharply political argument about the urgent stakes of representation that maintains a laser-sharp focus on detail when discussing the individual works in both their textual and visual registers."—Iranian Studies

"Ebrahimi’s book adds to expanding the field of Iranian diaspora studies, as it tackles the relationship between aesthetics and politics through a liberatory lens. Given our current political moment, works such as Ebrahimi’s are a welcome addition to thinking through the subversive potential of cultural representation in the Iranian diaspora."—International Journal of Middle East Studies

"This book makes an important contribution to cultural studies in that it steers us away from only making a paranoid critique of our world and instead reaches to the possibility of ethical democracy."—Dina Georgis, author of The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East

Mehraneh Ebrahimi is assistant professor of English at York University where she teaches courses in diaspora and world literature. Her research focus is on Middle Eastern literature in light of the ongoing "war on terror."

Book News: Recasting the Soviet Jew

How the Soviet Jew Was Made 

BY SASHA SENDEROVICH

Harvard UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780674238190

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674238190

This close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity.

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.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life.

This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew—not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. There is the Siberian settler of Viktor Fink’s Jews in the Taiga, the folkloric trickster of Isaac Babel, and the fragmented, bickering family of Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zemlenyaners, whose insular lives are disrupted by the march of technological, political, and social change. There is the collector of ethnographic tidbits, the pogrom survivor, the émigré who repatriates to the USSR.

Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former empire. Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life, all embodied in the novel cultural figure of the Soviet Jew. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew as a particular kind of liminal being as he offers a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

—Alice Nakhimovsky, author of Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America

Sasha Senderovich is assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is also an affiliate of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. With Harriet Murav, he translated the Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s novel Judgment. Senderovich has written on contemporary fiction by Russian Jewish émigré authors in the United States including Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, David Bezmozgis, and Irina Reyn.

Book News: Dos Passos in the interwar years

John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years

BY AARON SHAHEEN AND ROSA MARÍA BAUTISTA-CORDERO

University of Tennessee Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1621907138

https://utpress.org/title/john-dos-passos/

“I never could keep the world properly divided into gods and demons for very long,” wrote John Dos Passos, whose predilection toward nuance and tolerance brought him to see himself as a “chronicler”: a writer who might portray political situations and characters but would not deliberately lead the reader to a predetermined conclusion. Privileging the tangible over the ideological, Dos Passos’s writing between the two World Wars reveals the enormous human costs of modern warfare and ensuing political upheavals.

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 engaging collection of essays explores the work of Dos Passos during a time that challenged writers to find new ways to understand and render the unfolding of history. Taking their foci from a variety of disciplines, including fashion, theater, and travel writing, the contributors extend the scholarship on Dos Passos beyond his best-known U.S.A. trilogy. Including scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, the volume takes on such topics as how writers should position their labor in relation to that of blue-collar workers and how Dos Passos’s views of Europe changed from fascination to disillusionment. Examinations of the Modernist’s Adventures of a Young Man, Manhattan Transfer, and “The Republic of Honest Men” increase our understanding of the work of a complicated figure in American literature, set against a backdrop of rapidly evolving technology, growing religious skepticism, and political turmoil in the wake of World War I.

"John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling is a wide-ranging and engaging set of essays that extends and enriches the scholarship on Dos Passos. Welcome attention is given to Dos Passos’s travel writing, his work with theater, and the Iberian contexts so crucial for his artistic and political development. The collection also does justice to Dos Passos’s skills as a capacious chronicler of his time with pieces on how a diverse range of culture informed his writing—from clothes to burial practices to the contemporary cinema. A collection that decisively captures the wide sphere of interest of one of the key writers of left global modernism in the 1920s and 1930s."—Mark Whalan, Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English, University of Oregon 

"A trenchant and wide-ranging study of one of America's greatest authors. These essays trace the winding course of Dos Passos's writing and provide timely reflections on the functions of art in interesting times."—Wesley Beal, author of Networks of Modernism

“An essential addition to Dos Passos studies, John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling expands one of the field’s central debates—the impact of the writer’s politics on his representations of history—into the 21st century with new critical perspectives. The multiplicity of voices and approaches in this volume illustrate the range of forms—innovative fiction, political and travel essays, experimental drama, memoir—in which he expressed the turbulent political, economic, and cultural transformations that propelled the US and the world into modernity.” —Lisa Nanney, author of John Dos Passos and Cinema and John Dos Passos Revisited, and co-editor of The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos

AARON SHAHEEN is the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. His books include Androgynous Democracy: Modern American Literature and the Dual-Sexed Body Politic and Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture.

ROSA MARÍA BAUTISTA-CORDERO is a professor of translation and interpretation in the Department of English Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is the author of the most recent Spanish-language annotated translation of Manhattan Transfer.

A tribute to Morton P. Levitt, JML's editor-in-chief 1986-2005

 

© 1994, Temple University. Office of University Relations.

Morton P. Levitt (1936-2022), second editor of JML (1986-2005), died at home on September 10 of this year. Having worked closely with the founding editor Maurice Beebe from the journal’s inception in 1970, Mort (as he preferred to be called) self-identified as a “new critic,” though his form of it was the later New Criticism blended seamlessly with literary historical scholarship, especially focused on James Joyce and other international modernist writers, including Nikos Kazantzakis, about whom Mort wrote an important book: The Cretan Glance: The World and Art of Nikos Kazantzakis. Mort’s other books included Bloomsday: An Introduction to James Joyce's Ulysses; The Modernist Masters; Modernist Survivors; and The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction. With his wife Annette, a celebrated professor and scholar in her own right, he would welcome local, national, and international critics and writers (even critical theorists) into their home for parties where long-term friendships, not just connections, were made and sealed, an important project of civilization we now take for granted. 

As academic budgets began to be cut in the mid-nineties, Mort was able to search for a more stable publisher of JML and found one in Indiana University Press, which continues to provide loyal support for it. He also set up the transition to Ellen Rose as editor-in-chief as part of a new collective of editors that now jointly edits JML successfully on an expanded and more diversified basis. The journal owes the shape and substance of its present existence and of any future to come primarily to Mort, for whose foresight, wisdom, and friendship we are so grateful to have known and loved.

Book News: Woolf's engagement with science

Virginia Woolf, Science, Radio, and Identity 

BY CATRIONA LIVINGSTONE

Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781316514078

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/virginia-woolf-science-radio-and-identity?format=HB

This book offers an extensive analysis of Woolf's engagement with science. It demonstrates that science is integral to the construction of identity in Woolf's novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and identifies a little-explored source for Woolf's scientific knowledge: BBC scientific radio broadcasts. By analyzing this unstudied primary material, it traces the application of scientific concepts to questions of identity and highlights a single concept that is shared across multiple disciplines in the modernist period: the idea that modern science undermined individualized conceptions of the self. It broadens our understanding of the relationship between modernism and radio, modernism and science, and demonstrates the importance of science to Woolf's later novels.

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.

• Explores Woolf's engagement with four areas of modernist science: quantum physics, neurology, radio, and evolutionary science
• Includes detailed accounts of early BBC science broadcasts
• Demonstrates that the popular science of the modernist period participates in the construction of multiple, expansive models of identity that is characteristic of modernist literature

Catriona Livingstone's work has appeared in Women: A Cultural Review, Woolf Studies Annual, and the Journal of Literature and Science. She co-organized the 2017 British Society for Literature and Science Winter Symposium, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Journal of Literature and Science/BSLS Essay Prize in 2017.

Book News: The poetry of lost modernist Joseph Macleod

Hidden Sun: The Poetry of Joseph Macleod (1903 – 1984)

BY JAMES FOUNTAIN

Waterloo Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-915241-01-6

https://waterloopress.co.uk/books/joseph-macleod/

Hidden Sun is the first ever complete critical volume on the work of neglected British poet Joseph Macleod.

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.

Macleod was a vital British modernist poet in the same circles as Basil Bunting and Ezra Pound who became famous behind the microphone at the BBC as WW2 wartime newsreader. Bunting thought Macleod's The Ecliptic, published by TS Eliot at Faber in 1930 at Ezra Pound’s insistence,  was the greatest poem since The Wasteland. Macleod wrote many other volumes of poetry as well as several books on Soviet theatre history. His best friends were Graham Greene, Adrian Stokes, Compton Mackenzie, Aldous Huxley and WS Graham. He corresponded with Pound for 40 years.

James Fountain explores the development of Macleod's poetic style from his high modernist long poem, The Ecliptic (1930), through to the five books of poetry written under the pseudonym ‘Adam Drinan’; significant critical chapters by Andrew Duncan complete the text.

James Fountain’s fine monograph about Joseph Macleod is welcome news to admirers of Macleod’s poetry, which includes not only the fascinating modernist long poem The Ecliptic but the very different and better-known poems he published as Adam Drinan. Macleod’s poetry deserves more readers, and this book should help his work find them. --Keith Tuma, Miami University

James Fountain (and Andrew Duncan) explore why such a gifted poet has almost vanished from the story of British Modernism, and confidently reclaim his place. Based on original archival research, this book opens a new and exciting vista on a gifted poet and his troubled times. --James McGonigal, University of Glasgow

…this excellent account of Macleod should place him back into the public arena as a key modernist voice… James Fountain brings this forgotten voice alive, and offers us the chance to take up the challenge as the 21st century readership this poet so deserves. --Adam Piette, University of Sheffield

James Fountain (and Andrew Duncan) offer here an admirably lucid and companionable commentary on his works, drawing out the extraordinarily diverse elements that constituted his singular voice: by turns mythical, modernist, anthropological, socialist, populist, Scots. A poet who was regarded by writers as various as Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, and W.S. Graham is here handsomely recovered for a modern readership.  --Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford

Book News: Misdirection in Noir film and fiction

Noir Fiction and Film: Diversions and Misdirections

BY LEE CLARK MITCHELL

Oxford UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780192844767

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/noir-fiction-and-film-9780192844767?cc=us&lang=en&#

The argument of Noir Fiction and Film is curiously counterintuitive: that in a century of hard-boiled fiction and detective films, characteristics that at first seemed trivial swelled in importance, flourishing into crucial aspects of the genre. Among these are aimless descriptions of people and places irrelevant to plot, along with detectives consisting of little more than sparkling dialogue and flippant attitudes. What weaves together such features, however, seems to be a paradox: that a genre rooted in solving a mystery, structured around the gathering of clues, must do so by misdirecting our attention, even withholding information we think we need to generate the suspense we also desire. Yet successful noir stories and films enhance that suspense through passing diversions (descriptive details and eccentric perspectives) rather than depending on the center pieces of plot alone (suspected motives or incriminating traces). 

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 the greatest practitioners of the genre have realized, the "how" of detective fiction (its stylistic detours) draws us in more insistently than the "what" or the "who" (its linear advance). And the achievement of recent film noir is to make that "how" become the tantalizing object of our entire attention, shorn of any pretense of reading for the plot, immersing us in the diversionary delight that has animated the genre from the beginning.

Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, where he has served as Chair of the English Department and Director of the Program in American Studies. He teaches courses in American literature and film, with recent essays focusing on Cormac McCarthy, John Williams, the Coen brothers, and Edith Wharton. His recent books include Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels (Bloomsbury, 2017), Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre (Nebraska, 2018), and More Time: Contemporary Short Stories and Late Styles (Oxford, 2018).

Book News: Interviews with innovative Choctaw author LeAnne Howe

Conversations with LeAnne Howe

EDITED BY KIRSTIN L. SQUINT

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496836441

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-LeAnne-Howe

Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award–winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association’s first Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013).

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.

Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in this collection delve deeply into Howe’s poetics, her innovative critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and her position on subjects ranging from the Lone Ranger to Native American mascots. Two previously unpublished interviews, “‘An American in New York’: LeAnne Howe” (2019) and “Genre-Sliding on Stage with LeAnne Howe” (2020), explore unexamined areas of her personal history and how it impacted her creative work, including childhood trauma and her incubation as a playwright in the 1980s. These conversations along with 2019’s Occult Poetry Radio interview also give important insights on the background of Howe’s newest critically acclaimed work, Savage Conversations (2019), about Mary Todd Lincoln’s hallucination of a “Savage Indian” during her time in Bellevue Place sanitarium. Taken as a whole, Conversations with LeAnne Howe showcases the development and continued impact of one of the most important Indigenous American writers of the twenty-first century.

Kirstin L. Squint is the Whichard Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Humanities (2019–2022) and associate professor of English, specializing in Native American literatures, at East Carolina University. She is author of LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature and coeditor of Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies. She is also a contributor to Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to “Hillbilly Elegy,” winner of the 2020 American Book Award for criticism.

Book News: Ideology and form in Cold War era world literature

The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures 

EDITED BY FRANCESCA ORSINI, NEELAM SRIVASTAVA AND LAETITIA ZECCHINI                  

Open Book Publishers, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-80064-190-7 PDF

(open access electronic; purchase ebook and print below)

https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0254

 

This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War.

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.

The essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms.                 

With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.

             

Francesca Orsini is professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian literatures at SOAS, University of London and was Principal Investigator of the MULOSIGE project.

Neelam Srivastava is professor of postcolonial literature and world literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University (UK).

Laetitia Zecchini is senior research fellow (Chargée de recherche) at the CNRS in Paris (France) and visiting scholar at Boston University (USA).

Book News: The "craft labor" metaphor and literary production

Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture

BY CHRISTOPHER KEMPF

Johns Hopkins UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-1421443560

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12763/craft-class

The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor.

In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term "workshop" for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model.

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.

In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—a space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism.

Delineating an arc that extends from Boston's fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, Kempf shows, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? And on whose behalf does the poet punch in?

Challenging conventional histories of arts and crafts ideology, Craft Class offers a provocative genealogy of the creative writing workshop. Creative writers, in addition to scholars of contemporary American literature, will find this well-written book appealing.   -- John Marsh, Pennsylvania State University, author of Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry

Kempf performs a wonderful excavation of the meaning of the 'workshop' for the discipline of creative writing, demonstrating how it arose as a deeply human response to the problem of alienated labor in an industrial capitalist society. In a series of brilliantly chosen and illuminating case studies, he discloses the true historical significance of the craft ideal nurtured in such spaces, reawakening us to the utopian energies that circulate in the writing classroom even now.   -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

Christopher Kempf is a visiting assistant professor in creative writing at the University of Illinois. Recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and a PhD in English literature from the University of Chicago, he is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost and Late in the Empire of Men.