BOOK NEWS: How modernist writers reading faces reconfigured physiognomy

Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism

By Anca Parvulescu

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009599801 Open Access ebook

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/face-and-form/3C155E6711CD5D399C1F20B7DE1B2D24

Faces, faces, faces – faces everywhere! Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquity of the human face. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and, later, Kōbō Abe framed their literary projects around the question of the face, its dynamic of legibility and opacity. 

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.

In literary modernism, the face functioned as a proxy for form, memory, intermediality, or difference – and combinations thereof. The old pseudo-science of physiognomy, which assumed faces to be sites of legible meaning, was in the process reconfigured. Modernist faces lost their connection to interiority, but remained surfaces of reading and interpretation. As such, they also became canvases for creative appropriation, what Mina Loy called auto-facial-construction. The modernist overinvestment in faces functions as a warning against the return of physiognomy in contemporary technologies of facial recognition. 

“Face and Form reassesses the centrality of physiognomy in the modernist perception to ask what we can learn from it today. This book is a remarkable contribution to modernist studies, and a timely response to the ongoing debates on facial recognition technologies and the politics of COVID-19.” —Katja Haustein, lecturer in Comparative Literature, University of Kent

“Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism is an engaging, lucidly written account of the face as the site of a modernist struggle over form. Parvulescu offers brilliant re-readings of canonical modernist texts that focus on “modernist faciality” in light of their well-known experiments with character and literary form.” —Rochelle Rives, professor of English, City University of New York

Anca Pârvulescu is a scholar of comparative literature specializing in global modernism, literary and critical theory, literary comparatist, migration studies, and East Europe. She is the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at the Washington University in St. Louis. Her books include Laughter: Notes on a Passion (MIT P, 2010); The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (U of Chicago P, 2014); and with Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell UP, 2022).

BOOK NEWS: How Literary Suicides Expose Biopolitics

The Suicidal State: Race Suicide, Biopower, and the Sexuality of Population
By Madoka Kishi

Oxford UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780197690079

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-suicidal-state-9780197690079?cc=us&lang=en#

The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era discourse of “race suicide” and period representations of literary suicide. Against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century debates over immigration restrictions, “race suicide” suggests white Americans' low birth rate as foretelling an immanent extinction of the white race, prefiguring the contemporary white nationalist discourse, “replacement theory.” While race suicide personified the populational subject--the “race”--as a suicidal individual, Progressive-Era literature gave birth to a microgenre of literary suicides, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts.

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 Suicidal State argues that suicides in these texts literalize the fear of race suicide as they thwart the biopolitical demands for self-preservation, survival, and reproduction, articulating queer deathways that betray the nation's reproductive imperative. Both in its figuration of race suicide and in literary suicides, self-inflected death is imagined as a uniquely agential act in its destruction of agency, offering a fertile space for the reconceptualization of biopower's subject formation as it traverses individual and social bodies. That is, the book argues that suicide poses a limit case for the biopolitical management over life. Suicide, as it was imagined at the turn of the century, refuses, nullifies, and parries its obligatory relation to both biopower's discipline of the individual and its management of the population, thereby forging new forms of subjectivity and ways of being in the world that sidestep the twin imperatives for preservation and procreation. In tracking these queer potentialities of suicide, The Suicidal State offers a new history of sex and race, of the relation between individual and collective, of the formation of a biopolitical state that Foucault calls a “racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State.”

"Madoka Kishi's new book introduces a truly novel theory of queer biopolitics with an added bonus: the welcome arrival of an incisive intellectual historian. Taking seriously debunked ideologies of 'race suicide'-- and seriously taking them to historical task -- The Suicidal State mixes and mashes up literature, critiques of the state, and difficult questions of agency. With nimble readings of how this derided concept winds its way through fiction by Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and other luminaries, Kishi gifts us an exceptional, frequently startling account of reproduction, racialization, and the promising perils of social 'unbeing.'" -- Scott Herring, Yale University

"Madoka Kishi's remarkable new book reads white-supremacist anxieties about the threat of 'racial suicide'- a trope whose fatal echo shapes contemporary anti-immigrant discourse - against the backdrop of early twentieth-century literary suicides. Brilliantly weaving together American constructions of nationality, race, and gender with the pursuit of reproductive domination by persons of white European descent, The Suicidal State makes a dazzling case for viewing the choice of non-being as a response to the brutal political ontology that posits certain racialized subjects both as socially dead and as harbingers of death for the racial order of power on which American society rests. This is a must-read book for our times." -- Lee Edelman, Tufts University

"The Suicidal State shows us how the state came to long for the erotics of death in the Progressive Era: at the moment when self-murder became suicide and the body politic became the social body, race crossed with sex to deliver and imperil white reproduction. Kishi's arguments are a series of lapidary cuts that expose new desires that glitter with what they cut away, and each chapter presents a revelatory reading of a life canted toward collective death -- New England neurasthenic, Creole flirt, totemic Teuton, and the excretory American. The final turn to ill-fated Butterfly lashes this era to our present, and Kishi's understanding here -- brilliantly limpid and profoundly felt -- demonstrates, in her words, 'how to live on in a suicidal state.'" -- Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania

Madoka Kishi is a professional in residence in English at Louisiana State University. She has translated Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling (2022), and co-translated Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2024) and Judith Butler's Parting Ways (2019) into Japanese. She has published essays in the Journal of American Studies, The Henry James Review, and the Journal of Modern Literature.

BOOK NEWS: Listening to Gertrude Stein's plays as radio theater

 Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein's Parlor Plays

by Adam J. Frank

Northwestern UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780810148062

https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810148062/radio-free-stein/

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

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.

"With dazzling online recordings and scripts, Radio Free Stein takes readers backstage to reveal the inventive workshop process Adam Frank has used in productions of Gertrude Stein’s early voice plays. The 1934 NBC radio interview Stein gave on her US tour resonated with her playwriting “by making audience available as feeling” and Frank brilliantly renders this insight in productions that capture the plays’ strange and arresting illocutionary force."—Linda Voris, American University

“Radio Free Stein’s fluent roving across considerations of performance, psychoanalytic theorization of the radio, and philosophical and queer theories of the performative is brilliant and compelling. This is a significant contribution to both Stein studies and modern theater studies, as well as media and modernist studies.”—E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University

ADAM J. FRANK is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com.

JML 48.1 (Fall 2024) on Stein and Continental Modernism, is now LIVE!

 

JML 48.1 (Fall 2024), with clusters on Gertrude Stein and Continental Modernism, is now live on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54157

Content Includes:

Editorial News: Welcome New Co-Editor Jessica Burstein

Stein

Rei Asaba

“You Ain’t Ever Got Any Way to Remember Right”: Black Affectivity, Insistent Style, and Cross-Racial Transference in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” 

Nicole Gantz

Becoming a Minor Literature: Supposing in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons 

Kelly Krumrie

“Not Unordered”: Gertrude Stein’s Numbers

Chris Raczkowski

“The Man Being Dead”: Stein, Modernism and Detective Stories 

Continental Modernism

Thomas Waller

Confessional Desire: Censorship and Repression in Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s A Confissão de Lúcio 

Fredrik Tydal

“A Man Without Scruples”: The Swedish Judgment of Jay Gatsby 

Edward Waysband

The Politics of Childhood in Vladislav Khodasevich’s “Infancy” 

James Martell 

Modernism’s Totalities: From the Marquis de Sade to Titus-Carmel 

Feng Dong 

Overcoming Gravity: Celan, Nietzsche, and Nihilism

Ken R. Hanssen

W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Problems of Representation 

Reviews

Philipp Wolf

Mimesis: A Protean Concept

Amalia Cotoi

How Philosophy Turns up Its Nose at Smell: A Review of Simon Hajdini’s What’s That Smell? A Philosophy of the Olfactory 

BOOK NEWS: Stein's responses to the politics of authorship

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation: Democracy, Rights and Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933

BY ISABELLE PARKINSON

Edinburgh UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781474484329

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-gertrude-stein-and-the-politics-of-participation.html

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation offers a new way of reading Stein’s key publications: as responses to the politics of authorship and aesthetic participation

• Tackles the problem of Stein’s politics and challenges the scholarly tradition that reads Stein’s writing as ‘democratic’ by setting her texts firmly in the context of twentieth-century democracy
• Explores intersections between discourses of the author and the rights-bearing subject and between aesthetic and democratic participation
• Explores the way discourses of biological sciences and pseudo-sciences such as eugenics, as well as those of politics, law and education are mediated in literary conceptions of authorship

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 explores the politics of the right to write in Gertrude Stein’s practice and its reception. It examines how conceptions of authorship intersected discourses of democracy and rights in the period 1909-1933. The persistent debates across a broad range of publication contexts over Gertrude Stein’s right to participate in modernist authorship provide an instructive example of the way literary culture reflected contemporary political discussion. This study explores how representations of Stein that figured her either as barely human or as the ultimate democratic subject reproduced debates about who should participate in public life, refracted an emerging discourse of human rights, and echoed fears about the consequences of mass democracy as political franchise was extended.

"Isabelle Parkinson provides keen-eyed reappraisals of Stein's political writing, and of the political claims made by others about Stein's writing. Gertude Stein and the Politics of Participation is a sober, multidimensional guide to some of the most vexing problems of modernism and mass democracy." – Jeremy Braddock, Cornell University

Isabelle Parkinson is a teaching fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published on Gertrude Stein’s authorial identity and on the role of the anthology in constructing an avant-garde canon. Her work has appeared in, among others, the Journal of Modern Literature, Postmodern Cultures, and Bloomsbury’s Historicising Modernism series.

NEW ISSUE: JML 47.1 "Inheritances and Intertexts" is now LIVE!

 Journal of Modern Literature issue 47.1 (Fall 2023), on the theme "Inheritances and Intertexts" is now live on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51953

Content includes:

Aakanksha J. Virkar

Max Klinger’s Beethoven (1902), Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and the Anti-fascist Poetics of T.S. Eliot’s Coriolan I “Triumphal March” (1931) 

Matthew Thompson

Mobilizing Great War Literature: Rereading the English Canon through Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters

Courtney Ferriter

Inheriting the Language of Stein: The Pragmatist Poetics of Harryette Mullen

Paula Vene Smith

Day Today: Circadian Rhythms and the Sense of Unending in Poetic Diaries by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen

Erin Yanota

E.E. Cummings’s Shakespeare and the Modernist Middlebrow Sonnet

Dan Sperrin

The Augustan Plath: “Gulliver” and Other Poems

Sam Walker

“[S]ongs of allusion”: Sterling Brown, Harryette Mullen, and the Roots of Poetic Recycling

FREE

Jason Ciaccio

Modernity’s Waking Dreams: Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, and the Illuminations of Twilight States

Brian Brennan

“Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus”: W.H. Auden and the Latin Poet Venantius Fortunatus

Reviews 

Catherine Enwright

David Jones’s Medieval Voices: A Review of Poet of the Medieval Modern by Francesca Brooks

Layne M. Farmen

Gazing into the Eclipse: A Review of The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

Yingjie M. Cheng

“Possible, Possible, Possible”: Katherine Mansfield Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Burt Kimmelman

The New American Poetry, Personism, and the Cold War

Daniel T. O’Hara

The Gospel According to Lazarus

JML 46.1 (Fall 2022) "Literary Ethics, Literary History" is LIVE!

JML 46.1 (Fall 2022) on the theme "Literary Ethics, Literary History" is now available on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48859

Content includes:

David Dwan 

Unlucky Jim: Conrad, Chance, Ethics

FREE!

Shea Hennum 

Reading Borges Ethically

Aubrey Lively 

Ye Shall Bear Witness: An Ethics of Survival in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn 

Maggie Laurel Boyd 

Ordinary Language for Extraordinary Loss

Jack Dudley 

The Secularizing Work of the Novel: Modernist Form and Ian McEwan’s Saturday 

Heather Clark 

The Voice Within: Sylvia Plath’s Juvenilia, 1947-1950 

Johan Adam Warodell 

Reading Conrad’s Unpublished Trilogy: “Youth,” Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim

Howard Fisher 

The Emergence of Resemblances between People: Stein’s Diagrams in The Making of Americans 

Susan Farrell 

American Fascism and the Historical Underpinnings of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night 

FREE!

Walter Kalaidjian 

Occult Surrealism as “Profane Illumination”: Mina Loy, Leonora Carrington, and Ithell Colquhoun

Reviews

Christopher GoGwilt 

“Going Dead Slow”: Joseph Conrad’s Writing the Now, a review of Yael Levin, Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism 

John Zilcosky 

Kafka, or What Does Literature Sound Like? 

Ashley Byczkowski 

Derridean Deconstruction and Modernist Writer-Sons

Ali AlYousefi 

Revitalizing Close Reading

Gertrude Stein and the Future of Intelligence: A Closer Look at JML 43.3

Take a closer look at JML 43.3 (Spring 2020). Isabelle Parkinson discusses how her inquiry into the rhetoric of a 1920s debate over Gertrude Stein’s authorship cracked open a complex discursive network circling around the question of the role of literature for the future of intelligence. 

Read the post HERE

Parkinson's essay is a special read-for-free feature. Follow links in the post to access it.