NEW ISSUE: JML 48.3 "Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny" is now LIVE

Journal of Modern Literature 48.3 (Spring 2025) on the theme "Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny" is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55227

Content includes

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

Editor’s Introduction: Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny

Romy Rajan

Subaltern Mosquitoes and Cyborg Histories in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

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Tracy A. Stephens 

Kinship as a Counter to the Settler Gaze in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians 

Emad Mirmotahari 

Revisiting Juan José Saer’s El entenado / The Witness—Forty Years Later 

Isabelle Wentworth

Fluid Dynamics of Queer Desire: Ellen van Neerven’s “Water” and Lía Chara’s Agua 

Trevor Westmoreland

Inverting the Coordinates: Place, Dystopia and Utopia in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West 

Xiaofan Amy Li

Neo-Surrealism in Hong Kong: The Fiction of Hon Lai-chu and Dorothy Tse

Stanka Radović

Alice in Monsterland: Neocolonial Investigation in J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes

Mara Reisman 

Grotesque Spaces and Transformative Nature in Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque 

Tiasa Bal and Gurumurthy Neelakantan 

Memory, Uncanny, and Spectrality in Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon 

Umar Shehzad

“[D]elete the face it’s preferable”: Prosopagnosia as an Artistic Practice in Samuel Beckett’s Work

Xiaoshan Hou and Fuying Shen

Puppet and Paralipsis: The Performance of Maria and the Narrator in Joyce’s “Clay”

Derek Ryan 

Review: Abstraction for All

BOOK NEWS: Defamiliarizing reading via "deformative" Latin American fiction

Deformative Fictions: Cruelty and Narrative Ethics in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
By Ashley Hope Pérez

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5906-1

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215654.html

Tapping a rich vein of Latin American literature, Deformative Fictions by Ashley Hope Pérez excavates works that unsettle, defamiliarize, and disrupt access to the conventional pleasures of reading and interpretation. Close readings highlight the nuances of texts that have been misread, underread, or fetishized because they depart from literary norms, including fiction by Roberto Bolaño and Silvina Ocampo. 

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.

Interweaving rhetorical and narratological analysis with reflections on the ethical stakes of writing, reading, and interpreting deformative fictions and fictional cruelty, Pérez issues a resounding entreaty for us to expand our understandings of the value of narrative beyond the logics of utility and comfort. Doing so, she contends, allows readers to embrace the full possibilities of the relationships among authors, readers, and the worlds we inhabit on and off the page. In defamiliarizing the act of reading, deformative fictions reacquaint us with its ethical weight.

“Pérez brings a rich genealogy of Latin American literature into the narrative studies tradition, convincingly arguing why we should read works that refuse to offer us comfort. She offers critical food for thought for researchers and teachers alike, employing a beautiful writing style that illustrates complex ideas with ease.” —Doug P. Bush, author of Capturing Mariposas: Reading Cultural Schema in Gay Chicano Literature

Ashley Hope Pérez is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of the novels What Can’t Wait The Knife and the Butterfly, and Out of Darkness and the editor of the forthcoming anthology Banned Together: Authors and Allies on the Fight for Readers’ Rights.

Book News: Enriching our understanding of literary empathy

Modernist Empathy: Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny

BY EVE C. SORUM

Cambridge UP, 2019

ISBN: 9781108595667

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/modernist-empathy/83F710997D411394B54BD1912C59A983

This book shows how reading modernist literature gives us a fresh and necessary insight into both the tensions within the empathetic imagination and the idea of empathy itself. Writers such as Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Mary Borden, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf encourage us to enter other perspectives even as they question the boundaries between self and other and, hence, the very possibility of empathy. Eve Sorum maintains that we must think through this complex literary heritage, focusing on the geographic and elegiac modes of the empathetic imagination, and revealing empathy as more fraught, threatening, and even uncanny than it first appears. Modernist Empathy thereby forges a theory of literary empathy as an act not of orientation, but of disorientation, thereby enriching our contemporary understanding of both modernist literature and the concept of literary empathy. 

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.

Eve Sorum is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and was a Fulbright Scholar in Burkina Faso in 2013–14. She has published articles and essays on a range of topics, including the masochistic aesthetics of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, poetic self-elegies, and the democratic nostalgia of W. H. Auden.