BOOK NEWS: The influence of architecture on 20th century American poetry

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms

BY JO GILL

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780198868347

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modern-american-poetry-and-the-architectural-imagination-9780198868347?cc=us&lang=en

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive--if hitherto overlooked--engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both.

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 book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as "modern" (and often "international style") architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture--and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.

• Expands our understanding of poetry and place; poetry and the city; poetry and the arts
• Covers a range of familiar poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Frank O'Hara and Wallace Stevens and others who are less widely studied
• Brings architectural and poetic theory, practice, and debates together in unexpected and productive ways
• Opens up the field of twentieth-century American poetry to new interpretations
• Features unpublished archival research

Jo Gill is vice-principal and head of the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow. She specializes in mid-century American literature and culture and has published widely on writers including Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

BOOK NEWS: Jean-Luc Nancy's thought and aesthetic modernity

 Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism

EDITED BY COSMIN TOMA

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781501370144

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/understanding-nancy-understanding-modernism-9781501370144/

Over the past three decades, Jean-Luc Nancy has become one of the most celebrated contemporary philosophers. His remarkably diverse body of work, which deals with such topics as post-Heideggerian ontology, Christian painting, the experience of drunkenness, heart transplants, contemporary cinema and the problem of freedom, is entirely "immersed" in modernity, as he puts it. Within this plural framework, art – which he explicitly defines as a modern construct – plays a singular role in that it is the very prism through which he explores the problems of sense and feeling in general, particularly as they relate to “our” experience of 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 contributors to Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism fully delve into the heretofore under-acknowledged and under-explored modernism of Nancy's writings on philosophy and the arts through close readings of his key works as well as broader essays on the relationship between his thought and aesthetic modernity. In addition to an interview with Nancy himself, a final section consists of an extended glossary of Nancy's signature terms, which will be a valuable resource for students and experts alike.

"This is a stunning collection that will be a priceless resource for readers of Nancy's work. The essays are ddply knowledgeable and together they chart remarkably clear paths through all the major features of Nancy's world and his thinking of 'world.'" --Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California

"The texts included here demonstrate in incisive ways not only how Nancy's writings open onto understanding modernity but also how questions of modernity offer new and compelling paths for reading Nancy. It is a wonderfully impressive volume." --Philip Armstrong, Ohio State University

Cosmin Toma is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, St Hugh's College, UK. He has primarily published on modern and contemporary French literature, critical theory, music, and aesthetics. His first book, Neutraliser l’absolu. Blanchot, Beckett et la chose littéraire (2019) is an inquiry into what remains of what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe called “the literary absolute” when it is neutralized by modernity. He has also worked extensively as an academic translator.

Remembering Alan Wilde, JML editorial board 1970-2003

 

© Temple University Libraries, Special
Collections Research Center, 1986

We are saddened to report that Alan Wilde, a founding member of the Journal of Modern Literature's editorial board, passed away November 25, 2023, at age 94. He served on the editorial board from the journal's founding in 1970 until 2003.

Wilde earned his BA and PhD from Harvard University, spent a year in Britain on a Fulbright Scholarship, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. He was a professor at Temple University until retiring in 1994. 

His books include: Art and Order: A Study of E.M. Forster (New York UP, 1964); Christopher Isherwood (Twayne Publishers, 1971), Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Johns Hopkins UP, 1981; pb reprint with new preface, U of Pennsylvania P, 1987); Middle Grounds:  Studies in American Fiction (U of Pennsylvania P,1987). Wilde also published as editor a collection of critical essays Critical Essays on E.M. Forster (Twayne Publishers, 1990).

BOOK NEWS: Reconceptualizing Nietzsche’s relationship to Irish modernism

Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations 

BY MATTHEW FOGARTY

Liverpool UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781802077223 

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781802077223

Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations reconceptualizes Friedrich Nietzsche’s position in the intellectual history of modernism and substantively refigures our received ideas regarding his relationship to these Irish modernists. Building on recent developments in new modernist studies, the book demonstrates that Nietzsche is a modernist writer and a modernist philosopher by drawing new parallels between his engagement with established philosophical theories and the aesthetic practices that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot identified as quintessentially modernist. With specific reference to key Nietzschean philosophemes — eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, transnationalism, cultural paralysis, and ethical perspectivism — it challenges the longstanding assumption that Yeats, who repeatedly acknowledged his admiration for Nietzsche, is the most ‘Nietzschean’ of these Irish modernists.

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.

While showing how both Joyce and Beckett are in many important ways more ‘Nietzschean’ than Yeats, this interdisciplinary study makes a number of significant and timely contributions to the fields of Irish studies and modernist studies.

Nietzsche, the Protean philosopher par excellence, must be reinvented by each generation, and yet, in the first decades of the twentieth century, his revolutionary ideas were instrumental in bringing about Irish modernism, here represented by Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. Thanks to Matthew Fogarty’s astute, original, and compelling analyses, we discover an Übermensch speaking with an undeniable Irish accent. —Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

Matthew Fogarty is an associate lecturer at Maynooth University and University College Dublin. He has published articles in the Irish Gothic Journal, International Yeats Studies, Modern Drama, and the Journal of Academic Writing. His latest article is forthcoming in the James Joyce Quarterly. His co-edited collection, Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism, is forthcoming with Clemson University Press.