Book News: Modernists and Greek Tragedy

Tragedy and the Modernist Novel

BY MANYA LEMPERT
Cambridge University Press, September 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 9781108496025
https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/tragedy-and-modernist-novel?format=HB

This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.

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.

• Explains how modern novelists thought about ancient and modern tragedy
• Unveils the similarities between Greek tragedy and Darwinian evolution
• Explores modernist authors' depictions of nihilism, suicide, and political violence and apathy as cautionary tales for readers today, showing how fiction can endorse and condemn different ethical and political positions

‘This is an extraordinarily erudite book about literary modernism and the relationship between it and the history and theory of tragedy. Lempert's overall discussion of Greek tragedy is absolutely riveting and her close-reading of form is extraordinarily sensitive. Lempert has produced an extraordinarily bold argument that is likely to attract a great deal of attention not only from modernist scholars but from others further afield.' 

--Ato Quayson, Stanford University, California

‘The themes of this book could hardly be more resonant and enduringly relevant to modernist literary studies. This book pits tragedy and modern writing against nihilism – a way of renouncing or not caring about existence – finding a way for moments of light to counter total eclipse of meaning without callow resolution or pat consolation.' 

--Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne

 

Manya Lempert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona. She specializes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, ancient and modern tragedy and philosophy, and theories of evolution.

Poetry "by the eye"

What makes a poem visual? Andrew Williamson takes us on his journey to understand the roots of Ezra Pound's visual aesthetic in a "Closer Look" post for Indiana University Press, highlighting content from our latest issue, JML 43.4 (Summer 2020). 

You can read the full post HERE.

Williamson's essay, "Pound 're/ sound'" is a special read-for-free feature. You can access the free version HERE.

Approaching Cryptic Poetry

 As part of Indiana University Press's "A Closer Look" series, JML author Jerome J.H. Lim provides some background for his essay in the latest issue, explaining how we approaches the "cryptic" late poetry of contemporary British poet J.H. Prynne. 

You can read the full post HERE.

Lim's essay “Recurrence and Remembrance: Reading J.H. Prynne's ‘Reach Up’ and ‘Morning’ from Al-Dente (2014)” is a read-for-free feature. Access the free version HERE.

Poetry and Poetics issue now LIVE!

 

JML 43.4 (Summer 2020), on the theme "Poetry and Poetics: from Pound and Moore to Trisha Low and J.H. Prynne" is now live on JSTOR  and Project Muse. 

Content includes:

Andrew Williamson

Pound “re/ sound”

FREE!

Lukas Moe

“Not anyone’s Eden”: A Critical Introduction to New Poems by George Oppen

Zuzana Říhová

“Farewell to the Whole Epoch”: The Zone as the Beginning and End of the Czech Avant-garde

Lucy Harlow

“To Snare among the Briars”: Sensory Data and Two Early Literary Influences on In Parenthesis

Laura Blomvall

“Yet the frame held”: Poetic Form and the Bombing of London during World War II 

Jennifer Soong

The “To-Do” List Poem: Prospective Memory and a New York School Genre

Elina Siltanen

Conceptual Confession: Asymmetrical Emotion in Writer-Reader Relations in Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge

Jerome J.H. Lim

Recurrence and Remembrance: Reading J.H. Prynne’s “Reach Up” and “Morning” from Al-Dente (2014) 

FREE!

Eric Keenaghan

The Age of Olson

Rachel Trousdale

Reconceiving Marianne Moore

Feng Dong

The Poetic Pendulum: Valéry and Modern American Poetry 

Ann Marie Jakubowski and Vincent Sherry

David Jones and the Question of Poetic Coherence: New Approaches to his Later Work

Martin Lockerd

Theological Poetics between the Wars

Laura Vrana

Criticism and the Justification of Modernism

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Book News: Contemporary women writers and artists and their uniquely feminine ethics of desire

The Aesthetic Clinic: Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art

BY FERNANDA NEGRETE

State University of New York Press, September 2020

Hardcover: 978-1-4384-8021-3, $95

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6962-the-aesthetic-clinic.aspx

The Aesthetic Clinic examines experimental art and literature by women alongside psychoanalysis and philosophy to develop a new understanding of sublimation and aesthetic experience.

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.

In The Aesthetic Clinic, Fernanda Negrete brings together contemporary women writers and artists well known for their formal experimentation—Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector—to argue that the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire. To elaborate this ethics, Negrete looks to notions of sublimation and feminine sexuality developed by Freud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, and their reinvention with and after Jacques Lacan, including in the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But she also highlights how psychoanalytic theory draws on writing and other creative practices to conceive of unconscious processes and the transformation sought through analysis. Thus, the “aesthetic clinic” of the book’s title (a term Negrete adopts from Deleuze) is not an applied psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis. Rather, The Aesthetic Clinic privileges the call and constraints issued by each woman’s individual work. Engaging an artwork here is less about retrieving a hidden meaning through interpretation than about receiving a precise transmission of sensation, a jouissance irreducible to meaning. Not only do art and literature serve an urgent clinical function in Negrete’s reading but sublimation itself requires an embrace of femininity.

“Intellectually ambitious, original, cross-disciplinary, and coherently argued, there is much to admire in this book.” 

— Margaret Iversen, author of Photography, Trace, and Trauma

At the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Fernanda Negrete is assistant professor of French and executive director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. 

Deadlines approaching for two JML Calls for Papers

 DEADLINE: 25 September 2020

Underrepresented Women's Voices in Modern Literature (conference session)

 

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 by 25 September 2020.

 DEADLINE: 15 October 2020

1922 and After: A Centenary of Modernism and World Literature (JML special cluster)

Drawing upon anthropological, psychological, and philosophical knowledge as well as personal experiences, the high modernists wrote their now-famous classics, including The Waste Land, Ulysses, Jacob's Room, among many others, in the expanded context of a post-War generation facing the larger world via the influences upon them and the influences they and their works would create. These interrelationships among European, British, and American modernism (so-called international modernism), and the emergence of World Literature, provide the framework for the issue. 

How does 1922 speak to us today, after a century of ever-increasing globalization, regarding "literature in a globalized world," the understanding of the "comparative," Global South studies, the emergence and variation of World Literature? What does it achieve proleptically in a kind of analytic arc that takes the entire century into its consciousness and resets its existence within certain mores and modes of contemporary thinking and discourses? How does 1922 speak into our times and discourses rather than speak back? How do we re-consider history, tradition, notion of the contemporary, and literature today, a hundred years hence? 1922 has its own world-forming potentials –- the potencies to "world" radical ways of thinking and understanding within the disciplinary and epistemic complexities of 2022. Articles tracing this complex literary dialogue and genealogy via close attention to important but possibly neglected texts, expanding, re-aligning, or critiquing them, defines the broad outlines of the issue.  

Submissions should conform to MLA 8th edition style for documentation and manuscript formatting, and should include a 100-150 word abstract and 3-5 keywords. Submissions must be under 9,000 words for the entire submission package, including the abstract, notes, and works cited. No simultaneous submissions or previously published material. 

Submit manuscripts as a Word or RTF attachment to special coordinator Ranjan Ghosh at weransum@yahoo.co.in by 15 October 2020.

Book News: The small, grand, incendiary manifesto

The Manifesto Handbook: 95 Theses on an Incendiary Form

By JULIAN HANNA

Zero Books, 2020; Paperback: $19.95

https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/manifesto-handbook

The Manifesto Handbook describes the hidden life of an undervalued genre: the conduit for declarations of principle, advertisements for new “isms,” and provocations in pamphlet form. Often physically slight and small in scale, the manifesto is always grand in style and ambition. A bold, charismatic genre, it has founded some of the most important and revolutionary movements in modern history, from the declaration of wars and the birth of nations to the launch of countless social, political and artistic movements worldwide. 

Julian Hanna provides a brief genealogy of the genre, analyzes its complex speaking position, traces the material process of manifesto making from production to dissemination, unpacks its extremist underbelly, and follows the twenty-first century resurgence of the manifesto as a re-politicized and reinvigorated digital form. The book's visually striking, manifesto-like structure is divided into 95 theses, each with a short title introducing the topic (e.g. Performance, Lists, Feminist Futures). In terms of style, the book is as inventive and provocative as the genre it describes: blending sharp fragments, riveting anecdotes, a broad historical overview, and tips for manifesto writers of all kinds, it is always fresh, engaging and challenging.

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.

"A full-length book like this is long overdue, and it couldn't be better timed with the current climate of polarizing rhetoric, post-truth, Antifa, engaged art, etc. The brief history plus how-to lesson is a winning combination." 

-- Mark Yakich, Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor of English, Loyola University New Orleans

"The Manifesto Handbook is something like a meta-manifesto, which proclaims the joy and necessity of the manifesto form. Julian Hanna shows us how to both read them and write them, to have some fun and maybe change the world. Read this book, find your people, expose the enemy of the good life - and write your own!" 

-- McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media, The New School

JULIAN HANNA is assistant professor of Culture Studies at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.