JML 42.4 (Summer 2019), on the theme "Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee," is now available!
The sequence of names heading this issue’s thematic clusters—James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and John M. Coetzee—embody an ideal modernist lineage. Indeed, Beckett began his career as Joyce’s unofficial secretary, and he always named Joyce’s devotion to his art as influencing his decision to pursue a literary rather than academic career. Coetzee, who started out as a computer expert and an English professor, wrote an excellent dissertation on the style of Beckett’s Watt, as well as important essays on Beckett. Beckett offered both a repertoire of literary techniques and a model of ethical integrity. This sequence of names suggests that modernism has not yet lost its purchase as an umbrella term. Modernism has not been replaced by the “posts” that have been tried and petered out, one after the other.
Issue content includes:
Jean-Michel Rabaté
Editor’s Introduction: Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee
David Spurr
Trials of the Letter in Joyce and Proust
Neil R. Davison
“Ivy Day”: Dublin Municipal Politics and Joyce’s Race-Society Colonial Irish Jew
Georgina Binnie
“Photo girl he calls her”: Re-Reading Milly in Ulysses
Elizabeth M. Bonapfel
Joyce’s Punctuation and the Evolution of Narrative in Finnegans Wake
Megan Girdwood
“Danced through its seven phases”: Samuel Beckett, Symbolism, and Stage Choreographies
Rick de Villiers
A Defense of Wretchedness: Molloy and Humiliation
Patrick Whitmarsh
“So it is I who speak”: Communicating Bodies in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and The Unnamable
Emilie Morin
Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception
Shannon Forest
Challenging Secularity’s Posthistorical “Destination”: J.M. Coetzee’s Radical Openness in the Jesus Novels
Marc Farrant
Finitizing Life: Between Reason and Religion in J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Novels
Ian Tan
Ways into Joycean Silences: Reviewing James Joyce’s Silences
Michelle Chiang
Samuel Beckett and Modernist Film Culture: Review of Samuel Beckett and Cinema
Arya Aryan
The Late Style of Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee as Postmodernist Cynics
Erin A. Smith
Modernism for the Middle Class
More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
