Book News: New view of Proust's magnum opus

The World According to Proust

BY JOSHUA LANDY

Oxford UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780197648681

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780197648681?cc=gb&lang=en&

100 years after Proust's death, In Search of Lost Time remains one of the greatest works in World Literature. At 3,000 pages, it can be intimidating to some. This short volume invites first-time readers and veterans alike to view the novel in a new way.

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.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He was the author of stories, essays, translations, and a 3,000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus in which Joshua Landy invites the reader to view the novel as a single quest--a quest for purpose, enchantment, identity, connection, and belonging--through the novel's fascinating treatments of memory, society, art, same-sex desire, knowledge, self-understanding, self-fashioning, and the unconscious mind.

Landy also shows why the questions Proust raises are important and exciting for all of us: how we can feel at home in the world; how we can find genuine connection with other human beings; how we can find enchantment in a world without God; how art can transform our lives; whether an artist's life can shed light on their work; what we can know about the world, other people, and ourselves; when not knowing is better than knowing; how sexual orientation affects questions of connection and identity; who we are, deep down; what memory tells us about our inner world; why it might be good to think of our life as a story; how we can feel like a single, unified person when we are torn apart by change and competing desires. Finally, Landy suggests why it's worthwhile to read the novel itself-how the long, difficult, but joyous experience of making it through 3,000 pages of prose can be transformative for our minds and souls.

Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature and co-hosts the nationally syndicated public radio program "Philosophy Talk." His books include Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How to Do Things With Fictions (Oxford, 2012), and (as coeditor) The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009).

Book News: Unique biography examines Faulkner's daily life

William Faulkner Day by Day

BY CARL ROLLYSON

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496835017

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/W/William-Faulkner-Day-by-Day

William Faulkner has been the topic of numerous biographies, papers, and international attention. Yet there are no collected resources providing a comprehensive scope of Faulkner’s life and work before now. William Faulkner Day by Day provides unique insight into the daily life of one of America’s favorite writers. Beyond biography, this book is an effort to recover the diurnal Faulkner, to write in the present tense about past events as if they are happening now. More importantly, this book is concerned with more than the writer’s life. Instead, it examines the whole man—the daily, mundane, profound, life changing, and everything in between.

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 from the 1825 birth of Faulkner’s great-grandfather to Faulkner’s death 137 years later to the day, author and biographer Carl Rollyson presents for the first time a complete portrait of Faulkner’s life untethered from any one biographical or critical narrative. Presented as a chronology of events without comment, this book is accompanied by an extensive list of principal personages and is supported by extensive archival research and interviews. Populated by the characters of Faulkner’s life—including family and friends both little known and internationally famous—this book is for Faulkner readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the man and his work.

"William Faulkner Day by Day is a welcome addition to Faulkner studies. It is an essential source for Faulkner specialists—and interesting reading for all Faulkner enthusiasts. Faulkner the man as well as the writer is presented in all the various phases of his life. The book is informative, revealing, and, in quite a few rewarding instances, surprising." - Robert W. Hamblin, editor of A William Faulkner Encyclopedia

"In short, this is a book that anyone interested in William Faulkner will enjoy immensely. It is full of the man’s insights, humor, and contradictions. Reading it is an opportunity to witness an entire life, laid out day by day, from the young man starting out, to the old man nearing the end of life." - Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including The Life of William Faulkner; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biography have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Criterion, and he writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.

Book News: The possibilities and perils of disappearing acts in queer fiction

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

BY BENJAMIN BATEMAN

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192896339

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/queer-disappearance-in-modern-and-contemporary-fiction-9780192896339

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction breaks with appearance-based models of queer performativity and argues for the experiential richness and political potentials of recessive tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first-century queer literary production. The study theorizes a "perish-performative" that allows for agency in practices of abeyance, and it discovers within queerness's ample archive of vanishing acts an environmental ethos antithetical to inflationary versions of the human. 

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.

Tying modernist classics by E.M. Forster and Willa Cather to Andrew Holleran's gay classic Dancer from the Dance, and then moving to the contemporary ecogothic of Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream and the trans decadence of Shola von Reinhold's Lote, the book refuses the common wisdom that queerness becomes louder and prouder over time, delineating instead a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity wherein queerness finds escape, respite, and varied opportunities for imaginative reverie. This precarious subjectivity, necessitated but not defined by oppression and obstacle, rewards and restores the queer self, and it also contests the logics of development, acquisition, and productivity that wreak havoc on the planet and entrench social disparities of race, class, and ability. Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction supplies multiple accounts of the collective and personal pleasures, possibilities, and perils to be found in pulling away, going missing, and taking a break.

• Places modernist classics in conversation with contemporary queer and environmental fiction
• Intertwines literary studies, queer theory, and the environmental humanities
• Advances critical alternatives to 'coming out' narratives
• Revises theories of gender and sexual performativity

Benjamin Bateman is senior lecturer in Post-1900 British Literature at The University of Edinburgh and author of The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (Oxford UP, 2017). He previously held a joint appointment in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University Los Angeles, where he also served as director of The Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities. 

Book News: A history of critical responses to LGBTQ literature

LGBTQ+ Literature in the West: From Ancient Times to the Twenty-First Century

BY ROBERT C. EVANS

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350371835

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/lgbtq-literature-in-the-west-9781350371835/

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A survey, within one volume, of the history of critical responses to LGBTQ literature from the beginning to the present day, this book explores changes in attitudes, literature and criticism over a period of two and a half thousand years. For various reasons it focuses on literature of "the West," trying to give readers a clear sense, within a relatively short compass, not only of the development of "queer" literature (perhaps the most encompassing of all terms) but especially of critical responses to that literature, notably during the past century and particularly the past fifty years.

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.

All in all, this book offers a roadmap to much of the excellent scholarship concerning LGBTQ literature that has arisen in the last half-century – an era of unparalleled interest in the topic and an era that has moved the topic from the distant sidelines of literary study to a place ever closer to the center of things.

"LGBTQ+ Literature in the West is a valuable reference for students and specialists alike. Evans provides rich historical thumbnails that sketch and situate significance with critical trajectory: The reader gains immediate identification plus direction for greater competence and fluency." –Frederick Roden, University of Connecticut

"Robert C. Evans' coverage of generations of scholarship makes this an invaluable resource. It is a useful first stop for scholars of all levels who are researching canonical, Western, queer narratives and their authors." –Katie R. Peel, University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Robert C. Evans is I. B. Young Professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery. He is the author or editor of more than sixty books and of numerous essays.