Remembering Alan Wilde, JML editorial board 1970-2003

 

© Temple University Libraries, Special
Collections Research Center, 1986

We are saddened to report that Alan Wilde, a founding member of the Journal of Modern Literature's editorial board, passed away November 25, 2023, at age 94. He served on the editorial board from the journal's founding in 1970 until 2003.

Wilde earned his BA and PhD from Harvard University, spent a year in Britain on a Fulbright Scholarship, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. He was a professor at Temple University until retiring in 1994. 

His books include: Art and Order: A Study of E.M. Forster (New York UP, 1964); Christopher Isherwood (Twayne Publishers, 1971), Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Johns Hopkins UP, 1981; pb reprint with new preface, U of Pennsylvania P, 1987); Middle Grounds:  Studies in American Fiction (U of Pennsylvania P,1987). Wilde also published as editor a collection of critical essays Critical Essays on E.M. Forster (Twayne Publishers, 1990).

A tribute to Morton P. Levitt, JML's editor-in-chief 1986-2005

 

© 1994, Temple University. Office of University Relations.

Morton P. Levitt (1936-2022), second editor of JML (1986-2005), died at home on September 10 of this year. Having worked closely with the founding editor Maurice Beebe from the journal’s inception in 1970, Mort (as he preferred to be called) self-identified as a “new critic,” though his form of it was the later New Criticism blended seamlessly with literary historical scholarship, especially focused on James Joyce and other international modernist writers, including Nikos Kazantzakis, about whom Mort wrote an important book: The Cretan Glance: The World and Art of Nikos Kazantzakis. Mort’s other books included Bloomsday: An Introduction to James Joyce's Ulysses; The Modernist Masters; Modernist Survivors; and The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction. With his wife Annette, a celebrated professor and scholar in her own right, he would welcome local, national, and international critics and writers (even critical theorists) into their home for parties where long-term friendships, not just connections, were made and sealed, an important project of civilization we now take for granted. 

As academic budgets began to be cut in the mid-nineties, Mort was able to search for a more stable publisher of JML and found one in Indiana University Press, which continues to provide loyal support for it. He also set up the transition to Ellen Rose as editor-in-chief as part of a new collective of editors that now jointly edits JML successfully on an expanded and more diversified basis. The journal owes the shape and substance of its present existence and of any future to come primarily to Mort, for whose foresight, wisdom, and friendship we are so grateful to have known and loved.

Remembering Sheldon Brivic, 1943-2020

 By Daniel T. O’Hara, JML Co-Editor 

We are saddened to report that Sheldon (Shelly) Brivic, a JML advisory editor since the 1970s, retired Temple University English professor, and a Joyce and modern fiction specialist of considerable renown, died on November 29, 2020, at the age of 77. 

Another retired former colleague, close friend and JML advisory editor, Alan Singer, had heard the news and alerted me. Prior to his death,  Brivic had voluntarily been living with his wife Barbara, who had been ill with Alzheimer’s, in Sunrise of Lafayette, an assisted living facility specializing in memory care.

When I googled his name to learn more details, I was still in a bit of a shock. Thanks to Google, one of the items popping up was a 2019 letter to the New York Times, which I will quote in full as it is characteristic of Brivic: succinct, corrective, and objective.

March 22, 2019

‘Good Bait’

To the Editor:

James McBride’s fine review of the magnificent Toni Morrison’s “The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations” (March 3) refers to “the swing-era song ‘Good Bait,’ made famous by Count Basie.” Basie recorded “Good Bait,” but it was composed by the pianist Tadd Dameron, who has not received enough credit for being one of jazz’s greatest Composers.

Sheldon Brivic 

Lafayette Hills, PA   

This is not to say Shelly, as he was affectionately known by all, was lacking affect. He was subtle at self-expression, as in the last sentence here, with this reader thinking “shouldn’t any reviewer of this book know whereof he speaks concerning ‘Good Bait’ and its composer when it is a matter of pride in achievement by Morrison, African-American Nobel Laureate and should be so for James McBride, the nearly as well-known African-American writer, memoirist, and reviewer?” Shelly just states the facts, however, and leaves the ramifying implications, emotional and intellectual, to sort through, to us and McBride.

This was the same style Shelly expressed in his books, most (5 of the 7 scholarly monographs) on Joyce from a psychoanalytic perspective, including Joyce Between Freud and Jung (1980), Joyce the Creator (1985), The Veil of Signs: Joyce, Lacan and Perception (1991), Joyce’s Waking Women: A Feminist Introduction to Finnegan Wake (1995), Joyce through Lacan and Zizek (2008). The two other critical theoretical books he authored  are Tears of Rage: The Racial Interface of Modern American Fiction: Faulkner, Wright, Pynchon, Morrison (2008) and  Revolutionary Damnation: Badiou and Irish Fiction from Joyce to Enright (2017). Stealing: a Novel in Dreams was published in 2019 (JML’s review is available HERE). This JML blog got its start housing this review of Shelly’s novel. 

As a long-time JML advisory editor, Shelly did yeoman duty with evaluating submissions and reviewing new books in his field, as well as publishing articles himself. For example, in "Revolutionary Joyce" he reviewed a new book, The Strong Spirit: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce, 1898–1915, by Andrew Gibson (JML 38.2, Winter 2015, pp. 183-190); and in "Residual and Emergent Cultures in Joyce Studies" he reviewed several important new books, expanding Joyce Studies: Semicolonial Joyce by Derek Attridge, Marjorie Howes; Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes by Kimberly J. Devlin, Marilyn Reizbaum; Chaos Theory and James Joyce's Everyman by Peter Francis Mackey; Joyce's Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses by John S. Rickard; Joyce and Hagiography: Saints above! by R. J. Schork (JML 23.3/4, Summer 2000, pp. 575-581). His latest article in the journal was "The Lacanian Phallus and the Lesbian One in Wharton's 'Xingu'” (JML 35.2, Winter 2012, pp. 25-36).

Fifteen years ago, Shelly appeared with me and a then recently graduated PhD student of mine Gina MacKenzie (now associate professor and associate dean at Holy Family University and a current JML advisory editor) on an MLA Panel about Lacanian approaches to modernism. Gina and I discussed, from a Lacanian revised perspective on the drive, how some of Wallace Stevens’s so-called “poems of death” enacted shy solicitations of Death by a nearly fulfilled old Eros—only lacking this last Beloved to seal the deal with the Real, as it were. For his part, Shelly was discussing how Lacan and Zizek made him see Morrison’s fiction anew, as so many “tears of rage” as in the song of the title by the Band (co-written by its lead guitarist Robbie Robertson and Bob Dylan). What united us few in life then, and so many more now in this pandemic land’s death-in-life, is clearly a community of feeling enjoying rare pleasures in intellectual loves. Tears of rage may be tears of  grief, as the song puts it, but they are so only because they are first of all tears of love.  Shelly Brivic is a greatly missed colleague and friend.  

Sad goodbye to JML advisory editor Joshua B. Lukin

It is with great sorrow that the editors of JML acknowledge the sudden passing of advisory editor Joshua B. Lukin, who was known to all as a good man and a brilliant interlocutor.  We offer our sincerest condolences to his family and friends, and especially his wife Ann Keefer.  He will be missed terribly.

Philadelphia Inquirer obituary

Joshua B. Lukin Biography 

Josh Lukin taught full-time in Temple University’s First-Year Writing Program, where he has earned five Outstanding Teacher citations and been inducted into the Instructors’ Hall of Fame; he has also taught literature courses in the history of criticism, contemporary global fiction, noir film and fiction, and social issues in literature. His scholarly interests included U.S. Fiction since 1945 and Disability Studies. Josh has published articles, reviews, and interviews in such venues as Journal of Modern Literature, MLN, minnesota review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Encyclopedia of American Disability History. He was the editor of Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), an anthology in which he and six other scholars look at how, in an era where older modes of resistance were discredited, stigmatized, or destroyed, literature illuminated the efforts of marginalized groups to salvage or to reconceptualize their struggles for rights and recognition.

Dr. Lukin served on the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession and on Temple’s Interdisciplinary Faculty Council on Disability. His work has been taught at many schools, among them the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, Purdue North Central, the University of Minnesota, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, Central Michigan University, National Chiao Tung University, the University of Chicago, San Diego State University, Southern Illinois University, and Haverford College. His last projects include a collection of his interviews with feminist authors and Noir Recognitions, a study of identity in the 1950s novels of Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Philip Dick. He lived in Philadelphia and enjoyed dining out, folksinging, classical theater, chamber music, and feline companionship.