Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
Welcome to the Journal of Modern Literature news and information site.
Check here for updates about our latest issues, calls for papers, submission guidelines and tips, as well special online-only content. Our issues themselves are available at Project Muse and are archived on JSTOR . Check out the "Read for Free" page to enjoy some featured content.
More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
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) on the theme "The Matter of Poetry" is now available on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48858.
Content includes:
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
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
Stefania Heim
The Matter of Poetry
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."
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.
