BOOK NEWS: First book-length study of Beckett's complete poetry

Samuel Beckett's Poetry

EDITED BY JAMES BROPHY AND WILLIAM DAVIES

Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781009222549

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/samuel-becketts-poetry

Samuel Beckett's Poetry is the first book-length study of Beckett's complete poetry, designed for students and scholars of twentieth century poetry and literature, as well as for specialists of Beckett's work. This volume explores how poetry provided Beckett a medium of expression during key moments in his life, from his earliest attempts at securing a reputation as a published writer, to the work of restoring his own speech while suffering aphasia shortly before his death. Often these were moments of desperation and discouragement, when more substantial works were not possible: moments of illness, of personal loss or of public disaster. 

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 volume includes an introduction that contextualizes Beckett as a poet and a chronology of the composition and publication of all his known poems. Essays offer a range of critical perspectives, from translation theory, war poetics and Irish Studies to Beckett's debts to Modernism, Romanticism and the Jazz Age.

• Makes a systematic introduction to Beckett's poetry simple, clearly arranged
• The introduction and chronology provide readers with an overview of Beckett's poetry six decade career
• Chapters offer a range of critical perspectives, including translation theory, war poetics and Irish Studies

The editors and a distinguished team of contributors have produced a superb collection that leaves no poetic allusion unanalyzed. This book will be a classic of Beckett criticism. Here is scholarship taken to a high degree, adding contexts and glosses to Sean Lawlor’s and John Pilling’s pionneering work. Everyone interested in Beckett will need to read this engrossing book on the poetry and rediscover Beckett the poet. —Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

James Brophy is a lecturer in modern languages & classics, and preceptor in the Honors College of the University of Maine. His scholarship focuses on modern British and Irish literature, poetics, and classical reception studies. His work has appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, Translation Studies, Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, among other venues.

William Davies is a research fellow at the University of Reading. His work on Samuel Beckett includes the monograph Samuel Beckett and the Second World War (2020) and the edited volume Beckett and Politics (2021, with Helen Bailey). He was a contributor to the BBC Radio 4 documentary "Beckett's Last Tapes" (2019).

BOOK NEWS: Exploring the epistemological crisis within 1930s American poetry

Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America 

BY JUSTIN PARKS

 

Cambridge UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781009347839

https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/subjects/literature/american-literature/poetry-and-limits-modernity-depression-america?format=HB

Furnishing a novel take on the poetry of the 1930s within the context of the cultural history of the Depression, this book argues that the period's economic and cultural crisis was accompanied by an epistemological crisis in which cultural producers increasingly cast doubt on language in its ability to represent society. Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America pursues this guiding premise through six chapters, each framing the problem of the ongoing vitality of language as a social medium with respect to a particular poet: Louis Zukofsky and the commodification of language; Muriel Rukeyser and documentary photography; Charles Reznikoff and Depression-era historiography; Sterling A. Brown and the blues as both an ethnographic phenomenon and a marketable cultural product; Norman Macleod and Southwest regionalism; and Lorine Niedecker and ethnographic surrealism. The book closes by examining the shifting status of the poet as society transitioned from a focus on production to an emphasis on consumption in the Post-war period.

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.

• Provides a revised understanding of the cultural history of the Great Depression
• Furnishes updated interpretations of important poetic texts
• Provides an account of the relationship between poetry and crisis, which readers can apply to texts beyond the ones covered in this study

Justin Parks is associate professor at the Institute for Language and Culture at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway. His work is rooted in modern and contemporary poetry and American studies, with particular interest in Depression-era culture. His recent work engages with energy humanities: he has edited a special of Textual Practice on 'writing extractivism.'

BOOK NEWS: Unpacking Yeats's and Auden's conceptions of utopia

The Poetics of Utopia: Shadows of Futurity in Yeats and Auden 

BY STEWART COLE

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350293861

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/poetics-of-utopia-9781350293861/ 

Focusing on the work of two of the twentieth-century's most politically engaged poets -- W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden -- this book unpacks how they directly confront the concept of “utopia,” how they engage with utopia as a literary genre, and how their work conceives of poetry as a utopian artform capable of uniquely embodying our social aspirations.

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.

Despite consistently projecting visions of more ideal futures through both its subject matter and its form, poetry is not often counted among the annals of utopian literature. Through an examination of these two great writers' poems, essays, reviews, and other writings, with a focus on many of their best-known poems, this book highlights both the pervasive presence of a utopian impulse in their work and the importance of their contributions to discussions of utopia's meaning and relevance in both their own politically fraught era and ours.

"A ludic, carefully argue and insightful reading of two of the towering figures of British poetic modernism that raises productive questions about issues rarely raise at all--most vitally about the relationship between poetics and the untopian impulse, as well as the often conflicting and complex relationship between modernist disenchantment and utopian desire." --Antonis Balasopoulos, University of Cypress

Stewart Cole is associate professor of English and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where he teaches courses in modern British and Irish literature, literary criticism, and the environmental humanities. He is also the author of two poetry collections, Questions in Bed and Soft Power.

BOOK NEWS: Typographical experiments in modern poetry

The Graphics of Verse: Experimental Typography in Twentieth-Century Poetry

BY DANIEL MATORE

 

   

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192857217 

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-graphics-of-verse-9780192857217?cc=us&lang=en&

Is poetry a visual art? Why do the pages of nineteenth-century poetry look so different to those of twentieth-century verse? Exploiting the expressive possibilities of print--from spacing and indentation to alignment and typeface--is one of the defining ways in which poetry was modernized in the twentieth century. While the visual experiments of European poets have been well documented, the typographical explorations of poets writing in English have been largely neglected. This volume confronts a major unanswered question: why did British and American poets, from the beginning of the twentieth century right up to the present day, choose to experiment with the design and lay-out of the printed page?

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 book aims to provide the first detailed account of this lineage of literary style, examining the poetry and criticism of figures such as Ezra Pound, Hope Mirrlees, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, David Jones, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Frances Motz Boldereff, and J.H. Prynne. It draws on unpublished archival materials to show how poets began to draft, sketch, and compose in new and eccentric ways as they annexed the roles of book designer and printer. Typography, it argues, was instrumental in debates about metre, free verse, and the nature of poetry as poems morphed into scores, slogans, maps, and signs. It investigates how the typography of poetry was animated by musicology, psychophysics, linguistics, politics, ophthalmology, cartography, and advertising.

Daniel Matore is lecturer in modern, American and comparative literature at the University of York. He read for a BA and MPhil in English at the University of Cambridge, winning the Betha Wolferstan Rylands Prize. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford and has been awarded grants by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has previously been lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Jean Nordell Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

A Closer Look at JML 47.2: Michel Houellebecq, a Theorist of Fluid Identity?

Take a closer look at JML 47.2. JML author Klem James discusses Michel Houellebecq's views of "fluid identity" as stemming from an eroded self under neoliberalism, writing

Michel Houellebecq, arguably France’s best-known and most widely translated living author is perhaps an unlikely figure to be associated with contemporary debates about identity. Houellebecq is conservative, abused as being so, and sometimes wrongly considered to be reactionary. In his novel Submission (Soumission), he depicts France’s fate in the absence of a robust identity: having lost its moorings and sunk into a cultural and religious void, the country embraces Islam to fill the vacuum. By way of resistance, members of the French identitarian movement are depicted as the last gasp of a nation that is clambering for fixed, monocultural reference points. 

Read more HERE 

His JML 47.2 essay, “Particules Flottantes: Mutable Identity and Postmodern ‘Schizophrenia’ in the Works of Michel Houellebecq” is available for FREE, linked in the post.

Blasting out the past in Milkman: A Closer Look at JML 47.2

 

Take a closer look at JML 47.2. JML author Daniel R. Adler discusses Anna Burns's narrative experiments as a means to approach traumatic experiences, writing

After Milkman won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, it inspired some pretty extreme reactions. Some disliked it for its long paragraphs, digressions, and unnamed narrator. Other readers found the text’s thematic focus on sexual harassment during Northern Ireland’s Troubles era complicated by such elements. Perhaps because of Milkman’s success as a #MeToo text, certain readers had expectations of transparency. If so, has the postmodern flattening of aesthetic tiers caused readers to consider a novel like Milkman either an oddity or a disappointment? 

Continue reading HERE

His JML 47.2 essay "Making Visible the 'Mental Wreckage': A Historical Materialist Reading of Milkman" is available for FREE, linked in the post. 

JML 47.2 (Winter 2024), "Contemporary Works" is now LIVE!

 

Journal of Modern Literature 47.2 (Winter 2024), on the topic "Contemporary Works," is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52288

Content includes:

Editorial News

Maysaa Jaber

“I am a celebrated murderess”: Female Criminality and Multiple Personalities in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Klem James

Particules Flottantes: Mutable Identity and Postmodern “Schizophrenia” in the Works of Michel Houellebecq

FREE!

Rhys William Tyers

Houellebecq’s Platform: The Detective Novel and Its Infinite Boundary

Ian Almond

Armenians in Modern Turkish Literature: The Ghost Stories of Orhan Pamuk 

Jessica Morgan-Davies

Intermediality and the Politics of (Un)Making in Agnès Varda’s Visages Villages

Elin Käck 

A Spatiotemporal Collage Aesthetic: Poets and Poetry in Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future

Ciara Moloney

Word and Image in Alison Bechdel’s Memoirs

Daniel Dufournaud

“Reduced to Near Nothingness”: Don DeLillo’s Ethico-Political Project in Cosmopolis

Daniel R. Adler 

Making Visible the “Mental Wreckage”: A Historical Materialist Reading of Milkman 

FREE!

Alexandra Lawrie

“The lost boys of privilege”: Triangulation and the End of History in Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School 

Geoff Hamilton

Finite Jest: Irony and Healing in There There

Reviews

Aimee Pozorski

Language, Trauma, and Medicine: A Review Essay of John Zilcosky’s The Language of Trauma and a Defense of Trauma Theory

Sol Peláez

An Intimacy of Strangers: An Aesthetic Clinic

BOOK NEWS: Scrutinizing the rhythmical means of free verse poetry

Rhythm in Modern Poetry: An Essay in Cognitive Versification Studies

BY EVA LILJA 

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9798765100967

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/rhythm-in-modern-poetry-9798765100967/

A pioneering work in cognitive versification studies, scrutinizing the rhythmical means of free verse.

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.

Investigating a previously neglected area of study, Rhythm in Modern Poetry establishes a foundation for cognitive versification studies with a focus on the modernist free verse. Following in the tradition of cognitive poetics by Reuven Tsur, Richard Cureton and Derek Attridge, every chapter investigates the rhythms of one modern poem, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sylvia Plath and others, and engages each element in the broader interpretation of the poem in question.

In her examination of modernist poetry in English and other Germanic languages, Eva Lilja expands her analysis to discuss both the Ancient Greek and Norse origins of rhythm in free verse and the intermedia intersection, comparing poetic rhythm with rhythm in pictures, sculptures and dance. Rhythm in Modern Poetry thus expands the field of cognitive versification studies while also engaging readers writ large interested in how rhythm works in the aesthetic field.

"This is a landmark book. It sets out with clarity and commitment how an approach based in poetic cognition can illuminate poetry, metrics, rhythm, and reading, Rhythms in Modern Poetry take sthe reader on an intellectual and poetic journey in its compelling ideas and its artful expression" --Peter Stockwell, professor of literary linguistics, University of Nottingham

"Eva Lilja's new book is not only for the scholars and students of cognitive versification, but for anyone who is keen to gain deeper insight into the poetics of free verse. Through a meticulous analysis of historical context and diverse art forms, the book unveils the underlying cognitive processes that shape modern poetry and shows the reader new ways to uncover the rich and subtle meanings of poetic rhythm." --Maria-Kristina Lotman, associate professor in classical studies, University of Tartu, Estonia

Eva Lilja is professor emerita of literature, specializing in modernist poetry, in the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She pioneered the study of free versification since her doctoral thesis in 1981 and was the founder and chair for the Nordic Society for Metrical Studies (1995-2009). Lilja was also a Swedish Academy Researcher for writing the official Swedish handbook in metrics (1998-2006).