BOOK NEWS: Examining modern Catholic authors' approach to suicide

Suicide in Modern Catholic Literature

By Martin Lockerd

Cascade Books, 2025

ISBN: 9781666786019

https://wipfandstock.com/9781666786019/suicide-in-modern-catholic-literature/

Suicide plays a major role in modern literature and the philosophy that informs it. For Catholic authors, who have always understood the act within the framework of sin and redemption, it carries a special significance. In the last century, Catholic literary figures as diverse as J.R.R. Tolkien and Walker Percy, Robert Hugh Benson and Muriel Spark, J.K. Huysmans and Graham Greene, wrestled with the problem of suicide in their work and produced art that confronts the despair so common in modern existence. As suicide rates continue to increase across the developed world and entire nations embrace and expand legalized assisted suicide, this book draws readers back to Catholic literature as a resource for understanding and perhaps even resisting this trend.

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.

“Martin Lockerd’s book enters with profound compassion into the contemporary problem of suicide and the causes for it, which lie far deeper than a secular therapeutic culture can address. Starting with Michel Houellebecq’s diagnosis of a world suffering hopelessly from the death of God, Lockerd goes on to explore the wisdom of Catholic writers from Greene to Percy who suffer the desolation of the postmodern world and yet find a way to belief and hope.” —Glenn C. Arbery, professor of humanities, Wyoming Catholic College

“Suicide is too serious to be left to the psychologists. ‘Chemical imbalance’ cannot do justice to the deeper meanings of melancholy. Steeped in philosophical foundations and theological revelations that stave off sentimental, presumptive mercies, Martin Lockerd looks to literature lit with a Catholic vision to interrogate, with sustained sympathy, what attracts us to the abyss of self-immolation. Considering a richly eccentric range of authors—from Tolkien to Houellebecq—he weighs what is found wanting in modernity to diagnose a range of causes that tempt too many to jump to their deaths. Even as he grants the gains of good psychology, Lockerd avoids reducing literature to another therapeutic tool. Rather, drawing from literature’s capacity to form our feelings and grant them catharsis, he manifests the distinctive potencies of great and good books to help heal the sickness unto death.” —Joshua Hren, author of the novels Infinite Regress and Blue Walls Falling Down

Martin Lockerd is an associate professor and division dean at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. He joined UST in 2022 to help guide a renewed core curriculum in the Catholic liberal arts tradition. Dr. Lockerd received his BA from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and his PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin. His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, the Yeats/Eliot Review, Mythlore, and Logos. His first monograph, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism, was published in 2020.

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: Transdisciplinary study of literary madness

Madness And Literature: What Fiction Can Do for the Understanding of Mental Illness

EDITED BY LASSE R. GAMMELGAARD

U of Exeter P, 2022

ISBN: 9781905816378

https://www.exeterpress.co.uk/products/madness-and-literature

Mental illness has been a favorite topic for authors throughout the history of literature, while psychologists and psychiatrists such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers have in turn been interested in and influenced by literature. Pioneers within philosophy, psychiatry and literature share the endeavor to explore and explain the human mind and behavior, including what a society deems as being outside perceived normality.

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.

Using a theoretical approach that is eclectic and transdisciplinary, this volume engages with literature’s multifarious ways of probing minds and bodies in a state of mental ill health. The cases and the theory are in dialogue with a clinical approach, addressing issues and diagnoses such as trauma, psychosis, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, self-harm, hoarding disorder, PTSD and Digital Sexual Assault.

The chapters in Part I address literary representations of madness with a historical awareness, outlining the socio-political potentials of madness literature. Part II investigates how representations of mental illness in literature can offer unique insights into the subjective experience of alternative states of mind. Part III reflects on how literary cases can be applied to help inform mental health education, how they can be used therapeutically and how they are giving credence to new diagnoses. Throughout the book, the contributors consider how the language and discourses of literature—both stylistically and theoretically—can teach us something new about what it means to be mentally unwell.

There’s news here that moves us to reconsider not only what literature can teach us, but how it can teach us, and even be of service to people living with mental illness and those who treat and care for them. Here’s a lively and far-reaching contribution to the field of medical humanities. -- Maura Spiegel, division of narrative medicine, Columbia University

A wonderful array of critical and reflective accounts about literature representing mental illness in keeping with a health humanities approach that values interdisciplinary, inclusive and potentially applicable knowledge. -- Paul Crawford, professor of health humanities, University of Nottingham

 

Lasse R. Gammelgaard is associate professor at the Department of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he is co-director of the research group Health, Media and Narrative. He is author of the high school textbook Galskab i litteraturen [Madness in Literature]. His articles appear in Narrative, Style, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui and Journal of Research in Sickness and Society among others.