BOOK NEWS: Tracing the arbitrary or frivolous whims of four modernist authors

Modernism’s Whims

By Beci Carver

Oxford UP, 2026

ISBN: 9780198950721

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780198950721

Thomas Hardy asks of the ghost stalking him: 'Whither, O whither will your whim now draw me?' Immediately tripping up on its own laid-out comma, then pausing to howl theatrically, and hedging its bets with a stuttering, archaic 'whither' that skeptically hovers between 'where' and 'whether', this line has already begun to worry about where it is going or being 'whim-drawn.' On the other hand, it enjoys its worry, over-performs the conundrum. It is a whim addressing a whim.

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.

Beci Carver's Modernism's Whims is a book about whims; their tyrannies, arbitrariness, ultimate frivolity: how they may feel urgent for all their lightness, while still letting you play, letting you go, letting you off the hook. The book is at once a meditation on the whim as a phenomenon and an endeavor to track the specific (albeit necessarily intangible) literary whims of four modernist writers: Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare. Moving counter to the otherwise professionalized spirit of modernism, these literary whims and their author sponsors are imagined to occupy a fugitive position within the broader movement, their progress dangerously silly. Carver situates modernism after whim's Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century, at a literary-historical moment when authors were expected to know what they were about. Hardy's stalker ghost is on the run.

• Offers hundreds of original close readings of poems and prose passages, which in their turn contribute to a new take on the history of literary whims
• Offers a new lens on modernism, via a hitherto unknown modernist author, Elsie Elizabeth Phare
• The first extended and in-depth treatment of the debt to geometry in William Empson's poems

Beci Carver is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter. She earned her BA, MPhil, and PhD at Cambridge University,  and stayed on there for a four-year Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College. After that, she moved on to a teaching fellowship at University College London, followed by a three-year Early Career Leverhulme Fellowship. She took up a one-year lectureship at the University of St Andrews in 2016, and in 2017, was appointed to a permanent lectureship at the University of Exeter. Her first book is Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014). 

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. 

BOOK NEWS: Jean-Luc Nancy's thought and aesthetic modernity

 Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism

EDITED BY COSMIN TOMA

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781501370144

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/understanding-nancy-understanding-modernism-9781501370144/

Over the past three decades, Jean-Luc Nancy has become one of the most celebrated contemporary philosophers. His remarkably diverse body of work, which deals with such topics as post-Heideggerian ontology, Christian painting, the experience of drunkenness, heart transplants, contemporary cinema and the problem of freedom, is entirely "immersed" in modernity, as he puts it. Within this plural framework, art – which he explicitly defines as a modern construct – plays a singular role in that it is the very prism through which he explores the problems of sense and feeling in general, particularly as they relate to “our” experience of modernity.

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 contributors to Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism fully delve into the heretofore under-acknowledged and under-explored modernism of Nancy's writings on philosophy and the arts through close readings of his key works as well as broader essays on the relationship between his thought and aesthetic modernity. In addition to an interview with Nancy himself, a final section consists of an extended glossary of Nancy's signature terms, which will be a valuable resource for students and experts alike.

"This is a stunning collection that will be a priceless resource for readers of Nancy's work. The essays are ddply knowledgeable and together they chart remarkably clear paths through all the major features of Nancy's world and his thinking of 'world.'" --Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California

"The texts included here demonstrate in incisive ways not only how Nancy's writings open onto understanding modernity but also how questions of modernity offer new and compelling paths for reading Nancy. It is a wonderfully impressive volume." --Philip Armstrong, Ohio State University

Cosmin Toma is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, St Hugh's College, UK. He has primarily published on modern and contemporary French literature, critical theory, music, and aesthetics. His first book, Neutraliser l’absolu. Blanchot, Beckett et la chose littéraire (2019) is an inquiry into what remains of what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe called “the literary absolute” when it is neutralized by modernity. He has also worked extensively as an academic translator.

Book News: The narrowed politics of form in contemporary literature

 Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature

BY MITCHUM HUEHLS

Ohio State UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1524-1

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215241.html

Can form be political? Do specific aesthetic and literary forms necessarily point us toward a progressive or reactionary politics? Artists, authors, and critics like to imagine so, but what happens when they lose control of the politics of their forms? In Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature, Mitchum Huehls argues that art’s interest in revolution did not end with the twentieth century, as some critics would have it, but rather that the relationship between literary forms and politics has been severed, resulting in a twenty-first century investment in forms of generality such as genre, gesture, constructivism, and abstraction. 

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.

Focusing on three particular domains (art, theory, and revolution) in which the relationship between form and politics has collapsed, Huehls shows how twenty-first-century US fiction writers such as Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rachel Kushner, Salvador Plascencia, and Sheila Heti are turning to forms of generality that lead us toward a more modest, ad hoc, context-dependent way to think about the politics of form. The result is the first major study of generality in literature.

“With theoretical capaciousness, thematic timeliness, and rhetorical clarity, Art, Theory, Revolution makes a much-needed intervention into ongoing discussions about fictional realism, historical fiction, and political forms. In this way, Huehls promises to enliven debates about how novels possess their own political agency and contribute aesthetically to the making of theory.” —Alexandra Kingston-Reese, author of Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

“Huehls captures what’s exciting and unique about recent American fiction and remains clear-sighted despite dealing with difficult concepts in aesthetic theory, deconstructive thinking, and the politics of revolution. Art, Theory, Revolution breaks new ground in how we understand cultural production after postmodernism.” —Daniel Grausam, author of On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

Mitchum Huehls is associate professor in the Department of English at UCLA. He is the author of After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age and Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time and co-editor (with Rachel Greenwald Smith) of Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture.