Call for Papers: Amplifying voices of under-represented women in modern literature

 

Call for Papers

JML session for NeMLA annual convention, March 11-14, 2021

Philadelphia, PA (hybrid format)

http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

The Northeastern Modern Language Association convention session, led by the editorial board of the Journal of Modern Literature, will focus on reading under-represented women's voices in light of the Me-Too Movement.  For the last several years, the Me-Too Movement has worked to give voice to women and all sexually disenfranchised persons a platform to speak their trauma.  While this movement of revolution and healing has been a great development of the twenty-first century, women have been using writing as both a means of working through their own traumas and giving a space of catharsis to those who have no such opportunity.  The session will explore the political, social, economic and cultural positions of women creating and women featured in Modernist literature, with particular attention to the ways in which the disenfranchised voice uses writing to gain political and social power.  Presentations will focus the positions and reactions of women characters and authors faced with a lack of sexual autonomy.  There will be special attention paid, in this session, to under-represented groups of women, including but not limited to, women of color, women of non-binary orientation, and immigrant women.

Proposals--abstracts for a 15-minute conference presentation--should be sent to JML advisory editor Gina MacKenzie at gmackenzie@holyfamily.edu.

DEADLINE: 25 September 2020

Book News: Joanna Scott in conversation

Conversations with Joanna Scott

EDITED BY MICHAEL LACKEY

UP of Mississippi, 2020

Hardcover: 9781496829320, $99

Paperback: 9781496829337, $25

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Joanna-Scott

Joanna Scott (b. 1960) has been one of America’s leading writers since the 1990s. Both critically acclaimed and winner of numerous prestigious awards, Scott’s unique and probing vision and masterful writing has inspired readers to adjust their perceptions of life and of themselves. Her fiction jolts and illuminates, frequently exposing the degree to which the perverse is natural and the ordinary is twisted and demented.

Conversations with Joanna Scott presents eighteen interviews that span two decades and are as much about the process of reading as they are about writing. Witty, probing, wide-ranging, and insightful, Scott’s off-the-cuff observations about literature and life are as thought-provoking as some of the most memorable lines and scenes in her fiction. Not only shedding new light on Scott’s fiction, Conversations with Joanna Scott also illuminates enduring areas of inquiry, like the challenge of trying to make art out of sentences; the effort to recover and imagine lost stories from the past; the changing status of the literary imagination; fictional portraiture and the productive possibilities that come from blending biography and fiction; and concerns about literacy.

Joanna Scott has made her name through brilliant, award-winning novels, but this volume clarifies why she is also one of America’s leading public intellectuals and an astute critic of literature and culture.

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.

Michael Lackey is professor of English and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He has authored and edited nine books, mostly about the origins and evolution of the genre of biofiction. 

Book News: Modernist morsels

Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde 

EDITED BY JESSICA MARTELL, ADAM FAJARDO, AND PHILIP KEEL GEHEBER

UP of Florida, 2019; Hardcover: $85.00

ISBN 13: 9780813056159

https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813056159

Transnational in scope, this much-needed volume explores how modernist writers and artists address and critique the dramatic changes to food systems that took place in the early twentieth century. During this period, small farms were being replaced with industrial agriculture, political upheavals exacerbated food scarcity in many countries, and globalization opened up new modes of distributing culinary commodities. 

Looking at a unique variety of art forms by authors, painters, filmmakers, and chefs from Ireland, Italy, France, the United States, India, the former Soviet Union, and New Zealand, contributors draw attention to modernist representations of food, from production to distribution and consumption. They consider Oscar Wilde’s aestheticization of food, Katherine Mansfield’s use of eggs as a feminist symbol, Langston Hughes’s use of chocolate as a redemptive metaphor for blackness, hospitality in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Ernest Hemingway’s struggles with gender and sexuality as expressed through food and culinary objects, Futurist cuisine, avant-garde cookbooks, and the impact of national famines on the work of James Joyce, Viktor Shklovsky, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Less celebrated topics of putrefaction and waste are analyzed in discussions of food as both a technology of control and a tool for resistance.  

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The diverse themes and methodologies assembled here underscore the importance of food studies not only for the literary and visual arts but also for social transformation. The cultural work around food, the editors argue, determines what is produced, who has access to it, and what can or will change. A milestone volume, this collection uncovers new links between seemingly disparate spaces, cultures, and artistic media and demystifies the connection between modernist aesthetics and the emerging food cultures of a globalizing world.  

Jessica Martell is visiting assistant professor of English at Appalachian State University. Adam Fajardo is assistant professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College. Philip Keel Geheber is adjunct instructor of English at Fordham University.

Contributors: Giles Whiteley | Aimee Gasston | Randall Wilhelm | Bradford Taylor | Sean Mark | Céline Mansanti | Shannon Finck | Matthew Hayward | David A. Davis | Philip Keel Geheber | Chrissie Van Mierlo | Graig Uhlin  | Asiya Bulatova | Jessica Martell | Brooke Stanley | Carrie Helms Tippen | Adam Fajardo

Retraction notice

Analysis of an article by Robert Cardullo, "Wassily Kandinsky’s The Yellow Sound as a Total Work of Art: Reception and Interpretation" published in the Journal of Modern Literature issue 41.4, has clearly revealed extensive similarities with earlier publications by Professor Julia Listengarten. It is also a near duplicate publication of an article in another journal. These factors render the article an unoriginal publication. It is thereby in conflict with the publication policy of the Journal of Modern Literature and its publisher Indiana University Press. For this reason, the article has been retracted.

The Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Literature takes seriously its commitment to the publication of new, original work. To ensure the integrity of its publications and its management, the journal follows the basic guidelines for practices and procedures in publication ethics developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Our publication ethics are further spelled out on the journal's official page, under the tab "Publication Ethics."

The Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Literature

Gertrude Stein and the Future of Intelligence: A Closer Look at JML 43.3

Take a closer look at JML 43.3 (Spring 2020). Isabelle Parkinson discusses how her inquiry into the rhetoric of a 1920s debate over Gertrude Stein’s authorship cracked open a complex discursive network circling around the question of the role of literature for the future of intelligence. 

Read the post HERE

Parkinson's essay is a special read-for-free feature. Follow links in the post to access it.

Turbulent Democracy: A Closer Look at JML 43.3

Take a closer look at JML 43.3 (Spring 2020). Author Seth McKelvey considers how Joan Didion's 1984 novel Democracy speaks into our present moment of national unrest. "In Democracy," he notes, "'turbulence' is not a threat to this thing we call democracy, but rather its essence." 

Read the full post HERE

His essay is a read-for-free feature: follow the links in the post to access it.

Linguistic Politics: JML 43.3 (Spring 2020) is now live

JML 43.3 (Spring 2020) on the theme “Linguistic Politics” is now live on JSTOR and on Project Muse.

Content includes the following:

Isabelle Parkinson
Democrat or “imbecile”? Gertrude Stein’s Useful Knowledge and Discourses of Intellectual Disability in the To-day and To-morrow Pamphlet Series
READ FOR FREE

Grant Scott
The Duplicity of the Word in Lynd Ward’s Vertigo (1937) 

Florian Gargaillo
Wistful Lies and Civil Virtues: Randall Jarrell on World War II Propaganda 

Jiang Yunqin
Dialectic of Desire and the Populist Subject in All the King’s Men

Rebecca Couch Steffy
Steve Benson’s “Views of Communist China”: Experimental Form and the Orientalist Trace 

Raymond Blake Stricklin
“I Have Nothing to Say” — John Cage, Biopower, and the Demilitarization of Language

Seth McKelvey
Unstate: Disarticulating State Knowledge and Joan Didion’s Democracy
READ FOR FREE

Alexander Hartley
Beckett’s Legal Scuffles and the Interpretation of the Plays

Tracy A. Stephens
Disrupting the Homoerotic Appeal of State Power in Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? 

Kirsten Sandrock
Border Temporalities, Climate Mobility, and Shakespeare in John Lanchester’s The Wall 

Elizabeth Scheer
When Artists Respond: Charles Andrews’s Writing Against War 

Daniel Rosenberg Nutters
Aesthetics and Politics Again?

Sean Weidman
Encountering Anew the Ghosts of Modernism