BOOK NEWS: How mid-century authors sought to prevent policies of expulsion

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human

BY DAVID HERD

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192872258

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/writing-against-expulsion-in-the-post-war-world-9780192872258

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment. The book's starting point is the rapidly escalating use of detention as a response to human movement and the global production of geopolitical non-personhood in which detention results. As a matter of urgency, the book argues, we need to understand what is at stake in such policies and to resist the world we are making when we detain and expel. Writing Against Expulsion returns to a post-war period when the brutal consequences of the politics of expulsion were visible and when it was clear to writers of all kinds that space for the human had to be made.

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.

Drawing on contemporary histories of forced displacement, eye witness accounts, international legal documents, and on a range of emblematic cross-disciplinary texts and authors — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the poetry of Charles Olson, the revolutionary theory of Frantz Fanon — the book shows how mid-century writers both documented the lived experience of expulsion and asserted ways of thinking and acting by which expulsion could be prevented. What emerged were new languages of rights and recognition — new accounts of Moving, Making and Speaking — through which the exclusions of nation and border could be countered.

"Writing Against Expulsion is one of those books that arrives in the world and immediately feels necessary. David Herd asks and brilliantly answers two questions about the condition of unwelcome migrants and the UK government: 'how did we get here' and 'how do we move away from where we are?' Drawing on and building from the works of writers such as Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, the poet Charles Olson, as well as his own work with Refugee Tales, Herd re-casts conversations around 'political non-persons' to allow space for imagination, humanity and truth. A profound and inspiring book." -- Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

"Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World is a lucid and compelling report on the individual at the mercy of the bureaucracy of immigration control, `the geo-political non-person`, and how the condition of this figure relates to the aftermath of the 1939-45 War and the subsequent moment of decolonisation. It takes us through the political, philosophical and literary contexts with fluency, passion and rigour. Its engagement with the texts through which the argument progresses is extensive and thoroughly persuasive, and allows the reader to witness the personal journey Herd himself travelled in understanding the issues that are the subject of this wonderful and important book." -- Abdulrazak Gurnah, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

David Herd is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including All Just, described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "one of the few truly necessary works of poetry written on either side of the Atlantic in the past decade," and Walk Song, a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review. He has given readings and lectures in Europe, North America, India, and Australia and held visiting fellowships at George Mason University, Simon Fraser University, and the Gloucester Writers Center. He is professor of poetry at the University of Kent and co-organizer of the project Refugee Tales.

BOOK NEWS: Looking at cities through the stories people tell about them

City Scripts: Narrative of Postindustrial Urban Futures 

EDITED BY BARBARA BUCHENAU, JENS MARTIN GURR, AND MARIA SULIMMA

Ohio State UP, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1552-4

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215524.html

Storytelling shapes how we view our cities, legitimizing histories, future plans, and understandings of the urban. City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists to engage a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things”—how they intervene in the world and take action in everyday life. A multidisciplinary cast of contributors approaches this new way of looking at cities through the stories people tell about them, looking especially at political activism and urban planning, which depend on the invention of plausible stories of connectedness and of a redemptive future.

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 stakes are especially high in cities where economic, ecological, and social futures are delimited by histories of large-scale extraction and racialized industrial labor. Contributors thus focus on cities in postindustrial areas of Germany and the United States, examining how narratives about cities become scripts and how these scripts produce real-life results. This approach highlights how uses of narrative and scripting appeal to stakeholders in urban change. These actors continually deploy narrative, media, and performance, with consequences for urban futures worldwide.

“There are tremendous political and economic challenges to creating more just and resilient cities, but City Scripts is a reminder that the stories we tell about cities can be just as important as a new policy or funding scheme. The essays in this volume, along with a great conceptual introduction, are a vital entry point to understanding the importance of literary and cultural analysis in the broader field of urban studies.” —Robert R. Gioielli, author of Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago

“When reading this book, urban planners in the US and Germany will understand why transdisciplinary city narratives often provide better information on what citizens need than do master plans and voluminous technical reports on sustainable development. While declining industrial cities in the US and in Germany have long been branded as losers of economic transformation and capitalism, the case studies at the heart of this book tell other stories—of successful interventions and revitalization.” —Klaus R. Kunzmann, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London

“City Scripts reenergizes discussions at the intersection of urban studies and literary and cultural studies. Innovatively reading material spaces using narratological tools developed through the analysis of fictional texts, it will be a rich and productive resource for scholars across disciplines.” —Erin James, author of Narrative in the Anthropocene

Barbara Buchenau is professor of North American cultural studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Jens Martin Gurr is professor of British and Anglophone literature and culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Maria Sulimma is junior professor of North American literature and cultural studies at the University of Freiburg.

BOOK NEWS: Modernist studies meet critical animal studies

Beastly Modernisms: The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture

EDITED BY ALEX GOODY AND SASKIA MCCRACKEN

Edinburgh UP, 2023 

ISBN: 9781474498029

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-beastly-modernisms.html

A contemporary collection of scholarly essays exploring the vibrant intersections of modernist studies and critical animal studies

• Presents the diverse range of intersections between modernist and critical animal studies
• Includes cutting-edge research contributions from a heterogenous and interdisciplinary range of modernist scholars
• Offers a key research resource for scholars in modernist studies, critical animal studies and cognate areas
• Provides a classroom-ready collection of essays relevant to undergraduate and graduate courses on modernist writing and critical animal studies

The intersection of modernist studies and critical animal studies is a new and progressive field of enquiry that locates crucial questions about what it means to live with animals at the foundation of modernity. Beastly Modernisms gathers essays from leading figures in the field alongside new and emerging scholars who, together, revisit canonical figures and decentre the canons and geographies of modernism. Grounded in interdisciplinary approaches, the contributions work with cultural history and theoretical frameworks to unearth the multispecies dynamics of twentieth-century literature and culture. 

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 chapters in Beastly Modernisms present a diverse range of approaches and topics, exploring dogs in Virginia Woolf to Republican China, animals and gender in surrealism to African-American texts, Sámi reindeer to rat propaganda, modernist jellyfish to metamodernist beasts, 1940s poetry to Indian Partition stories, and chart the current and future state of modernist animal studies.

"Overall, these scholars offer a fascinating analysis of the ways in which writers use nonhuman animals to explore and contest the traditional limits of modernism. All of the volume’s essays are informed by sophisticated theoretical positions, but most are clearly written enough for determined undergraduates—although graduate students may find the volume more useful." – R.D. Morrison, Morehead State University

"A major contribution to animal studies as well as modernist studies, Beastly Modernisms gathers international perspectives that strategically redeploy modern profusions of beastliness—whether within, without, or betwixt and between (sometimes human) animals—in ways geared to advance timely feminist, antiracist, and decolonial critiques." – Susan McHugh, University of New England

Alex Goody is professor of twentieth-century literature & culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of Gender, Leisure Technology and Modernist Poetry: Machine Amusements (2019),Technology, Literature and Culture (2011) and Modernist Articulations: a cultural study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007), and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (2022), Reading Westworld (2019) and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009).

Saskia McCracken completed her PhD on Virginia Woolf’s Darwinian animal tropes at the University of Glasgow. Her research has been published in The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture: 1880-1950 (2021), Modernism/Modernity: Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction (2022), Animal Satire (2022), and Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism Beyond the Human, and Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene (2024). She also transcribed the first manuscript draft of Flush: A Biography for the Cambridge edition.

BOOK NEWS: A revival of pragmatist humanism as a form of anti-authoritarianism

Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics: Pragmatist Stories of Progress

BY ULF SCHULENBERG

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9798765102435

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/humanism-antiauthoritarianism-and-literary-aesthetics-9798765102435/

Presenting pragmatist humanism as a form of anti-authoritarianism, this book sheds light on the contemporary significance of pragmatist aesthetics and the revival of humanism.

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 interdisciplinary study shows that a mediation between pragmatist aesthetics – which emphasizes the significance of creating, making, and inventing – and Marxist materialist aesthetics – which values form – promises interesting results and that the former can learn from the latter.

In doing so, Ulf Schulenberg discusses 3 layers of the multi-layered phenomenon that is the revival of humanism: He first explains the potential of a pragmatist humanism, clarifying the contemporary significance of humanism. He then argues that pragmatist humanism is a form of anti-authoritarianism. Finally, he shows the possibility of bringing together the resurgence of humanism and a renewed interest in the work of aesthetic form by arguing that pragmatist aesthetics needs a more complex conception of form.

Establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics brings together literary and aesthetic theory, philosophy, and intellectual history. It discusses a broad range of authors – from Emerson, Whitman, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Dewey to Wittgenstein, Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Latour, and Rorty – to illuminate how humanism, pragmatism, and anti-authoritarianism are interlinked.

"In this sprawling and fascinating new book, Ulf Schulenberg argues powerfully that pragmatism, humanism, and anti-authoritarianism all hang together in a coherent, mutually reinforcing whole. The scholarship in this book is impressively wide-ranging. Drawing from a large and diverse cast of authors and thinkers, Schulenberg tells a thought-provoking story about what pragmatism is, and how it can assist in bringing about a more decent, free, and artistically rich human future." —David Rondel, University of Nevada, Reno

"In this provocative book, Schulenberg illuminates new entanglements between humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and pragmatism and shows why rethinking aesthetics is critical not just of the life of the arts, but for culture and practical life. He pushes back against traditional readings of Dewey (e.g. on aesthetic form) to urge pragmatist aesthetics toward more innovative approaches to contemporary art and the avant-garde. Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics will inspire fresh ways at looking at these issues and imaginative new conversations." —David L. Hildebrand, University of Colorado, Denver

Ulf Schulenberg is associate professor of American studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. He is the author of Zwischen Realismus und Avantgarde: Drei Paradigmen für die Aporien des Entweder-Oder (2000), Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left (2007), Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture (2015), Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics: From Finding to Making (2019), and Pragmatism and Poetic Agency: The Persistence of Humanism (2021). He has published widely in literary and cultural theory, aesthetics, and American and European intellectual history.

BOOK NEWS: 21st century American authors grapple with the construct of whiteness

Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America

BY STEPHANIE LI

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

ISBN 978-1-5179-1574-2

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/ugly-white-people

Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors (Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others) as they grapple with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take, Stephanie Li examines the tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice.

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 questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.

"Ugly White People is not about the 'racists' but about the way whiteness shapes the subjectivity of all white people. Relying on an elegant and parsimonious textual analysis of the work of contemporary authors, Stephanie Li shows how whites manage to evade while they acknowledge their whiteness, how they consume people of color through racist love, and how they accept whiteness in a way that neglects addressing racism. I highly recommend this book to readers interested in understanding contemporary whiteness." — Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University

"The best writing critically studying whiteness today intensely engages imbrications of race with other identities, especially class, gender, nationality, and disability. No one does all of that better than Stephanie Li. Addressing literary moments with a sure grasp of history and an adventuresome readings of texts, Ugly White People speaks compellingly to the persisting strength of Trump and white nationalism and to the desire for social media celebrity as something authors both explore and share." — David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

Stephanie Li is Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Pan-African American Literature, Playing in the White, and Signifying without Specifying.

BOOK NEWS: Global, multidisciplinary approaches to memory

Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches

EDITED BY BRETT ASHLEY KAPLAN

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350230118

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/9781350230118/

Bringing together a diverse array of new and established scholars and creative writers in the rapidly expanding field of memory studies, this collection creatively delves into the multiple aspects of this wide-ranging field. Contributors explore race-ing memory; environmental studies and memory; digital memory; monuments, memorials, and museums; and memory and trauma.

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.

Organized around 7 sections, this book examines memory in a global context, from Kashmir and Chile to the US and UK. Featuring contributions on topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement; the AIDS crisis; and memory and the anthropocene, this book traces and consolidates the field while analyzing and charting some of the most current and cutting-edge work, as well as new directions that could be taken.

"Brett Ashley Kaplan has put together an innovative and appealing collection that opens up a dynamic, multipronged vision of memory studies. With fiction and memoir placed side-by-side with essays by scholars, activists, and practitioners, Critical Memory Studies offers new directions for a field rapidly becoming institutionalized. Its global scope, interdisciplinary range, and attention to urgent areas of concern, such as ecology and race, make it a must read for all those concerned with the future of the past. —Michel Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

"Unique in its combination of creative and scholarly approaches to memory, this rich collection presents the cutting-edge of memory studies. Absolutely essential reading." —Susanne C, Knittel, Utrecht University, Netherlands

"This important volume shows the diversity of contemporary cultural memory studies. It opens new avenues for the field by bringing together scholarly and artistic work in a way that invites us to reflect on the fluidity between fictional and theoretical approaches to cultural memory." —Hanna Meretoja, University of Turku, Finland

Brett Ashley Kaplan directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies and is a professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her novel, Rare Stuff, was published in 2022 and she is the author of Unwanted Beauty, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, and Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth.

BOOK NEWS: An exploration of epigraphs and how they work

Common and Uncommon Quotes: A Theory and History of Epigraphs

BY JARED A. GRIFFIN

Vernon Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781648891144

https://vernonpress.com/book/1157

Common and Uncommon Quotes: A Theory and History of Epigraphs is a prolegomenon to the study of epigraphic paratextuality. Building on the work of Gerard Genette’s paratextual studies, this volume contextualizes and traces the practice of epigraphy in Anglophone literary history, from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. This study explores how epigraphs are used by author-functions as a hermeneutic for their text and to establish ethos with their audience, and how that paratextual relationship changed as publishing opportunities and literacy rates grew over four centuries. The first broad-reaching study of this kind, Common and Uncommon Quotes seeks to understand how epigraphs work: through their privilege on the page, their appeal to conjured ideas of the past, and their calls to citizenship.

Jared Griffin’s Common and Uncommon Quotes is exactly the sort of scholarship I enjoy. It’s thoughtful, engaging, and relevant across a broad range of fields and disciplines. As I read Common and Uncommon Quotes, I continually returned to my research, re-considering the significance of the epigraphs in the texts that figure most prominently in my own work. Griffin’s greatest strength might be his ability to cast the epigraph – almost universally overlooked and ignored – as a broadly significant critical concept that has application for literary historians, genre critics, and rhetoric scholars. I appreciated the genuine sense of curiosity that animates his research, and Griffin achieves that rare balance between rigor and approachability that is so difficult to find in much scholarship. For my own research, I appreciated Griffin’s rhetorical analysis of the role of epigraphs: the discussions of the impact of epigraph on the writer’s authority, their assumed relation to the canon, the position of the audience, and the expectations of the individual reader sparked a thoughtful consideration of the role of epigraphs in my own research into the role of rhetorical theory in the development of the novel in English. I suspect other scholars will have the same response: epigraphs and their impact are so universal that it’s remarkable such scholarship hasn’t been considered and pursued more broadly. —Jack M. Downs, Washington State University

Jared A. Griffin is associate professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He earned his PhD in English, with distinction, from Texas Christian University in 2009. He also holds an MEd in English Education and a BA in English. Griffin is the Language Editor for the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, and he writes a syndicated weekly newspaper column about English etymology and current events. Griffin first studied epigraphy in graduate school, where he worked on theorizing the function of epigraphs in pre-19th century American texts, especially during the American Revolution. He is currently working on a database to archive epigraphs and epigraphed texts, and he has presented on biblical epigraphy at conferences.