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: 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: Paris's Postwar Shadows

Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing

EDITED BY SARA R. HOROWITZ, AMIRA BOJADZIJA-DAN, AND JULIA CREET

 

SUNY Press, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8174-6 Paper

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8173-9 Hardcover

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6980-shadows-in-the-city-of-light.aspx

The essays in Shadows in the City of Light explore the significance of Paris in the writing of five influential French writers—Sarah Kofman, Patrick Modiano, George Perec, Henri Raczymow, and Irene Nemirovsky—whose novels and memoirs capture and probe the absences of deported Paris Jews. These writers move their readers through wartime and postwar cityscapes of Paris, walking them through streets and arrondissments where Jews once resided, looking for traces of the disappeared. The city functions as more than a backdrop or setting. Its streets and buildings and monuments remind us of the exhilarating promise of the French Revolution and what it meant for Jews dreaming of equality. But the dynamic space of Paris also reminds us of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The shadowed paths traced by these writers raise complicated questions about ambivalence, absence, memory, secularity, and citizenship. In their writing, the urban landscape itself bears witness to the absent Jews, and what happened to them.

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.

For the writers treated in this volume, neither their Frenchness nor their Jewishness is a fixed point. Focusing on Paris’s dual role as both a cultural hub and a powerful symbol of hope and conflict in Jewish memory, the contributors address intersections and departures among these writers. Their complexity of thought, artistry, and depth of vision shape a new understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish and French identity, on literature and literary forms, and on the development of Jewish secular culture in Western Europe.

Sara R. Horowitz is professor of humanities and comparative literature at York University and the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, also published by SUNY Press. 

Amira Bojadzija-Dan is research associate at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. 

Julia Creet is professor of English at York University and the author of The Genealogical Sublime. 

Together, they are also coeditors of H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy.