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).