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.

Book News: A provocative perspective on Pound and Pasolini

Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis

BY SEAN MARK

Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

ISBN: 978-3-030-91947-4

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91948-1

In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century? 

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 reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them – in particular, on Pound’s Italian years and Pasolini’s use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today.   

“Sean Mark’s Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis expounds incisively on Pasolini’s interview of Pound in 1967 to align two poets from opposite political camps, thus exposing the complex tension between poetry and ideology in both authors’ work. Mark’s acute and sophisticated readings result in a significant revision to our understanding of Pound’s and Pasolini’s respective poetics and places in contemporary culture. This is a distinguished and important book.” 

—Alessia Ricciardi, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Director of Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University

“As Sean Mark’s magistral comparative study brings together the antithetical poles of 20th-century poetry, it illuminates both corpuses: the later Pound turns into a Pasolini character, and the poetic myth he provided allows Pasolini to reshape his religious communism. Pound and Pasolini kept their faith in human creativity and redemption and thus remain true ‘educators,’ their dialogue a source of inspiration in times of crisis.” 

—Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania

“Sean Mark’s fascinating study of Pound and Pasolini ranges from their actual contacts – most notably Pasolini’s 1967 interview with Pound – to detailed consideration of their contrasting aesthetic and political approaches, culminating in unexpected parallels in the methodology of the fragmentary and late work in The Cantos and Petrolio. Mark adds new dimensions to our understanding of both the Italian Pound and the American Pasolini, and sets an example of how contemporary comparative scholarship can work.” 

—David Ayers, Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory, University of Kent

Sean Mark is associate professor in literature and translation at Université Catholique de Lille, France.

Book News: Uniting art, writing, and protest in the 1960s Black Arts Movement

Start a Riot!

Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement 

Drama, Fiction, and Poetry

BY CASARAE LAVADA ABDUL-GHANI

30% off during February

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496840455

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Start-a-Riot

While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent 1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses, scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic writings.

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.

Start a Riot! Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement Drama, Fiction, and Poetry analyzes riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ben Caldwell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Henry Dumas challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings. Representations of riots became more pronounced in the 1960s as pivotal leaders shaping Black consciousness, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. , were assassinated. BAM artist-writers sought to override the public's interpretation in their literary exposés that a riot’s disjointed and disorderly methods led to more chaos than reparative justice.

Start a Riot! uncovers how BAM artist-writers expose anti-Black racism and, by extension, the United States' inability to compromise with Black America on matters related to citizenship rights, housing (in)security, economic inequality, and education—tenets emphasized during the Black Power Movement. Abdul-Ghani argues that BAM artist-writers did not merely write literature that reflected a spirit of protest; in many cases, they understood their texts, themselves, as acts of protest.

"Start a Riot! will forge new directions in the study of art, political activism, and contemporary African American culture. Analyzing neglected or overlooked texts, Abdul-Ghani unveils the recurrent attention to the idea of the riot and sheds light on the complexity of thought during the Black Arts era, proving we might not know the Black Arts Movement and its key texts as well as we thought. "

-- GerShun Avilez, author of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani is a scholar of African American literary cultural studies and owner of Africana Instructional Design.

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.