Book News: Embracing the refugee

The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America

BY TIMOTHY K. AUGUST

Temple University Press, 2020

ISBN Paper: 978-1-4399-1531-8

http://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000009352

The refugee is conventionally considered a powerless figure, eagerly cast aside by both migrant and host communities. In his book, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America, Timothy August investigates how and why a number of Southeast Asian American artists and writers have recently embraced the figure of the refugee as a particularly transformative position. He explains how these artists, theorists, critics, and culture-makers reconstruct their place in the American imagination by identifying and critiquing the underlying structures of power that create refugees in the contemporary world.

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.

August looks at the outside forces that shape refugee representation and how these expressions are received. He considers the visual legacy of the Southeast Asian refugee experience by analyzing music videos, graphic novels, and refugee artwork. August also examines the power of refugee literature, showing how and why Southeast Asian American writers look to the refugee position to disentangle their complicated aesthetic legacy.

Arguing that “aesthetics” should be central to the conceptualization of critical refugee studies, August shows how representational structures can galvanize or marginalize refugees, depending on how refugee aesthetics are used and circulated.

"August presents a compelling and multifaceted analysis of Southeast Asian refugee artistic expression....The Refugee Aesthetic is critical, interdisciplinary, and brings needed humanity to the scholarship of migration.... (August) lays a detailed foundation for envisioning and re-envisioning what it means to be a refugee and exploring what that truer and more complex meaning tells America about itself."

—Ethnic and Racial Studies

“In the space between dominant American rhetorics of condescension or benevolence and emergent voices of authors who turn the release of information into artful acts of negotiation, Timothy August locates what he argues as the politics of the refugee aesthetic. Written with sensitivity to bring attention to subjective nuances of pain, belonging, reflexivity, and hope in numerous Southeast Asian American narratives and artworks, this book is a compelling testament to a stigmatized population’s admirably creative uses of discursive forms.”

—Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

“This erudite yet admirably lucid book brings to bear on refugee writing a new and productive set of theoretical frameworks that particularly emphasizes aesthetics and the visual. It offers fresh, compelling readings of works from Thi Bui’s graphic Narrative, The Best We Could Do, to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer. As a result, The Refugee Aesthetic immediately proves its worth to a wide audience, from readers interested in race and U.S. literature to those seeking guidance to the contemporary literary scene.”

—Timothy Yu, author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965

Timothy K. August is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University.

JML 44.2 (Winter 2021) is LIVE!

 

JML 44.2 (Winter 2021) 
"Modern Chinese Literature in the Context of World Literature"
guest edited by Wang Ning and Peng Qinglong
is now live on JSTOR and Project Muse

Content includes:

Wang Ning

Editor’s Introduction: Modern Chinese Literature from Local to Global

Reflections on Theories and Literary Trends

Wang Ning

Transvaluing the New Culture Movement: Toward the Construction of a Cosmo-Humanism

Yang Mingming and Yang Xin

Modern Chinese Literature under the Russian-Soviet Influence

Xiaohong Zhang and Jiazhao Lin

Between Modern and Postmodern: Contemporary Chinese Poetry from Outside in

Chengzhou He

Drama as Political Commentary: Women and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement in Cao Yu’s Plays

Tong King Lee

Hong Kong Literature: Colonialism, Cosmopolitanism, Consumption 

Interpretations of Writers and Their Works

Ming Dong Gu

Lu Xun and Modern Chinese Literature in the Context of World Literature

Zou Li 

Toward a New Narrative About China’s Anti-Japanese War: Reading Bodily Anxiety in Ba Jin’s Cold Nights

Weihua He

Fortress Besieged: Cynicism and Qian Zhongshu’s Narrative of the Modern Chinese “Self”

Peng Qinglong 

The National and Cosmopolitan Significance of Jia Pingwa’s Fiction

Lu Shao

The Rationale of Realism in Yu Hua’s To Live (1993) 

Afterword

Theo D’haen 

Modern Chinese Literature and World Literature from a European Perspective

Reviews

Feng Dong 

The Unbearable Affects of Being

James Belflower

Emerging Improvisations: A Review of Writing in Real Time | Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital

Catherine Flynn

Modernism at the Bar: Robert Spoo’s Modernism and the Law

Tanfer Emin Tunc 

Rethinking Modernism, Sex and Gender

Patrick Anson

The Work of Art and the Art of Work

Book News: Novels navigating new media

 Out of Print: Mediating Information in the Novel and the Book

BY JULIA PANKO

Paperback: 9781625345608

Hardcover: 9781625345592

University of Massachusetts Press, December 2020

https://www.umasspress.com/9781625345608/out-of-print/

Through technological experiments, readers have seen the concept of the book change over the years, and the novel reflects these experiments, acting as a kind of archive for information. Out of Print reveals that the novel continues to shape popular understandings of information culture, even as it adapts to engage with new media and new practices of mediating information in the digital age.

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 innovative study chronicles how the print book has fared as both novelists and the burgeoning profession of information science have grappled with unprecedented quantities of data across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the novel’s archival project took a critical turn from realism to an investigation of the structures, possibilities, and ideologies of information media, novelists have considered ideas about how data can best be collected and stored. Julia Panko pairs case studies from information history with close readings of modernist works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and contemporary novels from Jonathan Safran Foer, Stephen King, and Mark Z. Danielewski that emphasize their own informational qualities and experiment with the aesthetic potential of the print book.

"This is a complex and fascinating book that has illuminating things to say about the novel as a genre; about the future of the book, the future of the novel, and the future of literary reading; about the form of information and the category of form itself; and about the information ecology of the digital world. It is lucidly and elegantly written, and its scholarship is impressively detailed and rigorous."—John Frow, author of Character and Person

 

"Out of Print explores the continued importance and power of the book in a digital age of increased big data. It draws from many important works of scholarship across the interdisciplinary fields of new media, book history, and literary studies. This weaving together of scholarship and literary texts, from modernism and contemporary literature, is a valuable contribution."—Jessica Pressman, author of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age

JULIA PANKO is associate professor of English at Weber State University.

Book News: A distinctly modern vulnerability

The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds

BY NIR EVRON

SUNY Press, November 2020

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8067-1

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6967-the-blossom-which-we-are.aspx

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.

The Blossom Which We Are traces the emergence of a distinctly modern form of human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile and time-bound cultural frameworks that we inhabit—as it manifests in the realm of the novel. Nir Evron juxtaposes seminal works from diverse national literatures to demonstrate that the trope of cultural extinction offers key insights into the emotional and ideological work performed by the realist novel. With an analysis that ranges from the works of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence and Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March and Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous, and finally to the current state of the humanities, this book seeks to recover literary criticism’s humanistic mission, bringing the best that has been thought and said to bear on urgent contemporary concerns.

“This book is gorgeously written. What might appear on its face as the yoking together of three culturally remote and only tangentially related texts turns out to function as a genealogy of and meditation upon the emergence of the experience of the culturally tangential.” — Irene Tucker, author of The Moment of Racial Sight: A History

Nir Evron is assistant professor of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Book News: Environmental writing in the 1930s and 40s

The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s

BY MATTHEW M. LAMBERT

UP of Mississippi, 2020

Hardcover : 9781496830401

Paperback : 9781496830418

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Green-Depression

Dust storms. Flooding. The fear of nuclear fallout. While literary critics associate authors of the 1930s and ’40s with leftist political and economic thought, they often ignore concern in the period’s literary and cultural works with major environmental crises. To fill this gap in scholarship, author Matthew M. Lambert argues that depression-era authors contributed to the development of modern environmentalist thought in a variety of ways. Writers of the time provided a better understanding of the devastating effects that humans can have on the environment. They also depicted the ecological and cultural value of nonhuman nature, including animal “predators” and “pests. ” Finally, they laid the groundwork for “environmental justice” by focusing on the social effects of environmental exploitation.

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.

To show the reach of environmentalist thought during the period, the first three chapters of The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s focus on different geographical landscapes, including the wild, rural, and urban. The fourth and final chapter shifts to debates over the social and environmental effects of technology during the period. In identifying modern environmental ideas and concerns in American literary and cultural works of the 1930s and ’40s, The Green Depression highlights the importance of depression-era literature in understanding the development of environmentalist thought over the twentieth century. This book also builds upon a growing body of scholarship in ecocriticism that describes the unique contributions African American and other nonwhite authors have made to the environmental justice movement and to our understanding of the natural world.

"Many of the important authors considered in this study—Nelson Algren, Tillie Olsen, James T. Farrell, and Richard Wright, to name a few—have received insufficient attention from ecocritics, and yet, as Matthew M. Lambert shows in The Green Depression, their work and other writing during the Depression and the World War II eras is profoundly relevant to the roots of contemporary environmentalism that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. "

- Scott Slovic, coeditor of Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment

Matthew M. Lambert is assistant professor of English at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, where he teaches courses in American literature. His work has appeared in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Book News: New trends in Hemingway studies

 The New Hemingway Studies

EDITED BY SUZANNE DEL GIZZO AND KIRK CURNUTT

Cambridge UP, September 2020

Hardback ISBN: 9781108494847

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/new-hemingway-studies?format=HB

The subject of endless biographies, fictional depictions, and critical debate, Ernest Hemingway continues to command attention in popular culture and in literary studies. He remains both a definitive stylist of twentieth-century literature and a case study in what happens to an artist consumed by the spectacle of celebrity. The New Hemingway Studies examines how two decades of new-millennium scholarship confirm his continued relevance to an era that, on the surface, appears so distinct from his—one defined by digital realms, ecological anxiety, and globalization. It explores the various sources (print, archival, digital, and other) through which critics access Hemingway. Highlighting the latest critical trends, the contributors to this volume demonstrate how Hemingway's remarkably durable stories, novels, and essays have served as a lens for understanding preeminent concerns in our own time, including paranoia, trauma, iconicity, and racial, sexual, and national identities.

• Provides an overview of recent scholarly trends in Hemingway studies
• Re-imagines Hemingway studies in new contexts
• Demonstrates gaps in current scholarship and adumbrates possible paths for future inquiry

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.

Contributors

Suzanne del Gizzo, Kirk Curnutt, Robert W. Trogdon, Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale, Krista Quesenberry, Laura Godfrey, David Wyatt, Sarah Anderson Wood, Debra A. Moddelmog, Ian Marshall, Loren Glass, Lisa Tyler, Marc K. Dudley, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Kevin R. West

Suzanne del Gizzo, Chestnut College, is editor of The Hemingway Review.  She has published over twenty articles in scholarly journals and has co-edited two books, Ernest Hemingway in Context with Debra A. Moddelmog and Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden:  25 Years of Criticism with Frederic J. Svoboda.

Kirk Curnutt, Troy University, Alabama, is the author of several volumes of literary criticism and fiction, including, most recently, the edited-volume American Literature in Transition: 1970-1980, the pocket biography William Faulkner, and The 100 Greatest Literary Characters, co-authored with James Plath and Gail Sinclair.

Book News: The "still life spirit" in modernism

 Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers

BY CLAUDIA TOBIN

Edinburgh UP, 2020

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-modernism-and-still-life.html

ISBN Hardback: 9781474455138

ISBN ePub: 9781474455169

ISBN PDF: 9781474455152

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterized as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris.

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.

• Explores the ‘still life spirit’ in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetry
• Challenges the conventional positioning of still life as a ‘minor’ genre in art history
• Proposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual culture
• Provides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and dance
• Uncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace Stevens

Modernism and Still Life reminds us that Modernism not only introduced new ways of making art but also new ways of looking at art. Tobin is alert to the paradoxes inherent in the title 'still life' but also to the many ways in which stillness and movement enter into conversation in early modernism. This is a work of deft scholarship and considerable originality of thought. It makes a fresh intervention into a major subject and deepens understanding, offering another landmark in the historiography of Modernism.

– Frances Spalding, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge

Claudia Tobin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and the Huntington Library, California. She has published commissioned articles, scholarly book chapters, and exhibition catalogues on interdisciplinary topics including Virginia Woolf and still life, modernism and colour, and on Vanessa Bell's abstract painting as part of Tate's 'In Focus' series. She is General Editor, with Julian Bell, of Ways of Drawing, Thames & Hudson (2019).