BOOK NEWS: How portrait photos serve as literary motifs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf

Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion

By Marit Grøtta

Edinburgh UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781399526982

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-reading-portrait-photographs-in-proust-kafka-and-woolf.html

Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grøtta discusses these writers’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.

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.

• Considers the emotional and relational implications of portrait photographs for three modernist writers
• Offers a comparative study of the motif of reading portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf
• Discusses how portrait photographs prompt feelings of love and gratification as well as feelings of frustration and distress in the beholders
• Discusses the modernists’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of such pictures early in the 20th century
• Reconsiders the modernists’ relation to the visual media and the possibilities for contact, communication, and sympathy early in the twentieth century
• Considers how the increased circulation of portrait photographs transformed human relations and the relation between the private and the public spheres

"Marit Grøtta makes us see how Proust, Kafka and Woolf read faces mediated by photography and revealing truth, power and sympathy in this wonderful new physiognomy of modernism." – Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

"This illuminating reading of portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf offers both a probingly fresh understanding of modernism and a genealogy of our face-infested moment and scrambled private-public boundaries." – John Durham Peters, Yale University

Marit Grøtta is professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and a number of articles on Schlegel, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Queneau, and Agamben. Her research interests are nineteenth-century and modernist literature, visual culture, media philosophy and aesthetic theory.

BOOK NEWS: Modern literature and the science of sleep

Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929 

By Sebastian P. Klinger

Johns Hopkins UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781421450803

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53855/sleep-works

At the turn of the twentieth century, sleep began to be seen not merely as a passive state but as an active, dynamic process crucial to our understanding of consciousness and identity. In Sleep Works, cultural historian and literary scholar Sebastian P. Klinger explores the intriguing connections between scientific inquiry and literary expression during an era when sleep was both a scientific mystery and a cultural fascination.

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.

Scientists, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies were at the forefront of this newfound fascination with sleep: some researchers distinguished sleep from related states such as fatigue and hypnosis, while others investigated sleep disorders and developed treatments for insomnia. Meanwhile, literary giants like Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust grappled with their own sleep disturbances and channeled these experiences into their writing. Through the lens of their discoveries, Klinger reveals the broader implications of sleep for concepts of selfhood and agency.

Tracing the emergence of interdisciplinary sleep science and the cultural production of sleep through literature, Sleep Works weaves together literary analysis, historical context, and research in the archives of the pharmaceutical industry to provide a comprehensive and compelling account of how sleep has been understood, represented, and experienced in the modern era.

"So much has been written on dreams in literature, so little on the experience of sleep itself. Klinger's fascinating book breaks the mould by placing texts by Proust, Valéry, Kafka, Rilke, and Schnitzler in the context of the sleep science of the early 20th century, as well as the burgeoning drug industry. Paying close attention to language and form, it shows how literary works generated new modes for discussing and understanding sleep. A major contribution to literature and science studies." — Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford

"Klinger's book is that rare piece of scholarship that takes up a familiar topic and transforms it into a genuinely new field of inquiry. His incisive analyses introduce us to the poetics of good and bad sleep while showing how literary discourses perform their own sleep experiments." — Jan Mieskowski, Reed College

Sebastian P. Klinger is a researcher and teacher-scholar in the department of German Studies at the University of Vienna, as well as an Honorary Faculty Research Fellow in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford.

Book News: Lyotard's groundbreaking lectures on "infantia" now in English

Readings in Infancy

BY JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD

EDITED BY ROBERT HARVEY AND KIFF BAMFORD

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350167360

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/readings-in-infancy-9781350167360/

"Nobody knows how to write." Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one of the most important writer-philosophers of the twentieth century, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French in 1991 as Lectures d'enfance, these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. In them, Lyotard investigates his idea of infantia, or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, either human or technological.

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.

Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sigmund Freud. This volume – with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford – contextualizes Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

Contents include:

• Foreword, Robert Harvey 
• "Infans," translated by Mary Lydon
• "Return: Joyce," translated by Robert Harvey & Mark S. Roberts.
• "Prescription: Kafka," translated by Christopher Fynsk
• "Survivor: Arendt," translated by Robert Harvey & Mark S. Roberts
• "Words: Sartre," translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
• "Disorder: Valéry," translated by Robert Harvey
• "Voices: Freud," translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele
• Afterword, Kiff Bamford 

Robert Harvey is distinguished professor emeritus at Stony Brook University. His most recent books are Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017) (translations in Japanese and French forthcoming in 2020), a translation of Deguy's To That Which Ends Not: Threnody (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics (Continuum, 2010), which appeared in French as Témoignabilité (MetisPresses, 2015), and De l’exception à la règle (Éditions Lignes, 2006) on USA PATRIOT Act. He is a major co-editor of the Œuvres complètes of Marguerite Duras in the Pléiade edition with Gallimard.

Kiff Bamford is reader in contemporary art at Leeds Beckett University, with research interests in performance art and continental philosophy. He has published widely on the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard with a focus on the inter-relationship between art and philosophy. Monographs include: Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2017) and  Lyotard and the figural in Performance, Art and Writing (Continuum, 2012). Bamford edited and introduced the collection Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (Bloomsbury, 2020). 

JML 44.1 (Fall 2020) is LIVE!

 

JML 44.1 (Fall 2020) on the theme "Genealogies and Historiographies" is now live on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.44.issue-1 and on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/43684

Contents include:

Genealogies of the Modern

Michael Bedsole

Exteriority and Interiority in T.S. Eliot’s Graduate Work  

Ignasi Ribó 

“At the farthest pole from man”: Kafka’s Posthuman Outlook on War 

John S. Bak

Tennessee Williams’s “Homage to Ophelia (A Pretentious Foreword)” with Commentary

Joseph Darlington

Anthony Burgess and William S. Burroughs: Shared Enemies, Opposed Friends

Kevin McGuirk

“[T]he apple an apple”: Ammons, Bloom, and “the ten thousand things” – with Emerson and Lao Tzu 

Dream Historiographies

Clare Udras Ellis

Pursued by Time: The Chronolibidinal Aesthetics of Katherine Mansfield 

Annaliese Hoehling

Seeing History in the Baroque Ruins of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September: An Indictment of Cosmopolitan Modernity

Liran Razinsky

Psychoanalysis and Autobiography: Leiris, Freud and the Obstacle to Self-Knowledge 

Jesse Zuba

Raymond Carver and the Modern Career Imaginary

Bram Mertens

Dread, Desire and Destruction: The Historical Sublime in Erwin Mortier’s Marcel (1999) 

Reviews

Elizabeth Scheer

Surveying the Damage: Marina MacKay’s Modernism, War, and Violence

Robert L. Caserio

Audacious Reconciliation

Farisa Khalid

Good, Brave Causes: British Fiction of the 1950s