Book News: first person plural in contemporary fiction

 We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction

BY NATALYA BEKHTA

Ohio State UP, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1441-1 Hardcover

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214411.html

Natalya Bekhta’s We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction analyzes a storytelling form shaped by the pronoun “we,” probing the tensions between individuality and collectivity in more recent narratives in English. Despite a growing interest in collective characters and the we-form in narratology and beyond, narrative theory has not yet done justice to the plural voice in fiction. In fact, the formulation of a poetics of collective expression needs clear theoretical conventions and a reassessment of established concepts in order to approach plural voices and agents on their own terms. We-Narratives addresses this demand by distinguishing between indicative and performative uses of the first-person plural pronoun in fiction and by identifying formal and rhetorical possibilities of stories told by group narrators.

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.

What does it mean for a multitude to speak as one? How can a truly collective narrative voice be achieved or lost? What are its aesthetic and political repercussions? In order to tackle these questions, Bekhta reads a range of contemporary novels and short stories by Jeffrey Eugenides, Joshua Ferris, Toby Litt, Zakes Mda, Joyce Carol Oates, and Julie Otsuka. She also focuses on narrative innovation by Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, and Susan Sontag. These narratives feature group protagonists and narrators and therefore offer insight into collective narrative discourse and focalization, construction of communal knowledge and unreliability. We-narrative, taken as a distinct storytelling form, illuminates fiction’s expressive potential and nuances models of narrative analysis.

“Combining theoretical sophistication, interpretive acumen, and a broad range of narratological insights, Natalya Bekhta’s We-Narratives delivers a compelling account of narratives cast in the we-form.” —Marco Caracciolo

Natalya Bekhta is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

Book News: A sheltering space in postwar British fiction

Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain

BY PAULA DERDIGER

Ohio State UP, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1452-7 Hardcover

ISBN: 978-0-8142-8076-8 Ebook

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214527.html

Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain by Paula Derdiger assesses the impact of World War II and the welfare state on literary fiction by focusing on one of the defining issues of the postwar period: housing. Through compelling close readings and lively historical and cultural analysis, Derdiger argues that literary realism was a necessary, generative response to the war and welfare state since they impacted the built environment and landscape. Wartime decimation of buildings and streets called for reconstruction, and reconstruction called not just for bricks and mortar, architectural drawings, town plans, preservation schemes, and new policies but also for fiction that invited particular ways of inhabiting an environment that had been irrevocably changed. 

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.

Derdiger argues that fiction, like actual buildings, creates a sheltered space for the mediation between individual subjects and the social and geographical environments that they encounter. Realist fiction, specifically, insists that such mediation is possible and that it is socially valuable. Covering writers spanning various social positions and aesthetic tendencies—including Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, and Elizabeth Taylor—Derdiger shows how these authors responded to the war with realistic technique, investing in external conditions just as much as or more than their characters’ interior lives. In doing so, their reconstruction fiction helped to shape postwar life.

“Paula Derdiger’s book superbly meets the requirements of the second decade of the twenty-first century for new studies addressing the need to rebuild the social and material spheres that have been depredated by decades of the promotion of a neoliberal individualism.” —Nick Hubble, author of Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question

“Reconstruction Fiction tackles an important subject that is central to  current scholarship on British mid-century literature, but it does so in an original way and—vitally—it marshals a range of writers with real élan.” —Leo Mellor, author of Reading the Ruins: Bombsites, Modernism and British Culture

“Paula Derdiger’s Reconstruction Fiction is a welcome and necessary book, one that adds significantly to a richer and more nuanced understanding of twentieth-century British literature and culture.”—Todd Kuchta, author of Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present

Paula Derdiger is assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Book News: Exploring Flann O'Brien's dark comedy

 Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour

EDITED BY RUBEN BORG AND PAUL FAGAN

Cork University Press, 2020

ISBN: 9781782054214

https://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Flann-O-Brien-p/9781782054214.htm

The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O’Brien’s art. The organizing theme of Gallows Humour focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death and the comic spirit in the author’s canon. These innovative analyses explore the place of biopolitics in O’Brien’s modernist experimentation and popular writing through reflections on his handling of the thematics of violence, justice, capital punishment, eugenics, prosthetics, skin, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, auto-immune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games, and masculinist nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts.

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.

Ruben Borg is associate professor and chair of the department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to Gallows Humour, he co-edited two volumes on Flann O’Brien for Cork University Press: Contesting Legacies (with Paul Fagan and Werner Huber: 2014), and Problems with Authority (with Paul Fagan and John McCourt: 2017).

Paul Fagan is senior scientist at Salzburg University, as well as a lecturer at the University of Vienna and co-founder of the Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theories Summer School. As well as co-editing the Cork University Press collections Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014) and Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017), Fagan is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society and is presently completing a monograph on the Irish Literary Hoax Tradition.

Christine Brooke-Rose speaks to our precarious times

Take a Closer Look at JML 44.3 (Spring 2021). Author Marija Grech discusses the continued relevance of Christine Brooke-Rose’s work and how it engages with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Her essay is a Read-for-Free feature, linked in the post: https://iupress.org/connect/blog/christine-brooke-rose/

Jean Rhys's Lively Objects and Objectified Lives

 JML author Laurel Harris discusses the "impasse genre" and her research on the lively objects and objectified lives in Jean Rhys's fiction, in a post for Indiana University Press, available HERE.

Harris's essay is now a read for FREE feature:

"Impassagenwerk: Jean Rhys’s Interwar Fiction and the Modernist Impasse." Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 44, no. 3, Spring 2021, pp. 19-34. 

JML 44.3 (Spring 2021) is LIVE!

 

JML 44.3 (Spring 2021) is now available. Find it on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.44.issue-3 and on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/45120

From modernist impasses to our post-literary moment

Mi Jeong Lee

The Ugly Politics of (Im)passivity, or Why Conrad’s Anarchists are Fat

Laurel Harris

Impassagenwerk: Jean Rhys’s Interwar Fiction and the Modernist Impasse

FREE!

Elysia Balavage

Illumination, Transformation, and Nihilism: T. S. Eliot’s Empty Spaces

Alexandra Edwards 

Orlando: A Fanfiction; or, Virginia Woolf in the Archive of Our Own

Louis Armand

“He Proves by Algebra”: James Joyce’s Post-Literary Incest Machines

Infinities of the post-

Arleen Ionescu 

Blanchot in Infinite Conversation(s) with Beckett 

Jeffrey Peer 

Hot Spinsters: Revisiting Barbara Pym’s Virtuous Style

Farah Ali

Freedom as a Mirage: Sexual Commodification in Harold Pinter’s Films

Renée Tursi

Searching Pragmatism in Marilynne Robinson 

Marija Grech

Re-Visions of the End: Christine Brooke-Rose and the Post-Literary 

FREE!

Reviews

Jonathan Culler

Intertexts of Intertextuality 

Robert Savino Oventile

Transports, Earthbound

Omri Moses

Technological Paranoia: A Review of Andrew Gaedtke’s Modernism and the Machinery of Madness

James Martell

Logic of Missed Encounters: A Review of Arka Chattopadhyay’s Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real 

Ruben Borg

Beckett’s Insistent Bodies

Susan Mooney

The Insider’s View of Beckett’s Re-Generating Art

Book News: Donald Hall in Conversation

Conversations with Donald Hall

EDITED BY JOHN MARTIN-JOY, ALLAN COOPER, RICHARD ROHFRITCH

University Press of Mississippi, 2021

Hardcover ISBN: 9781496822468

Paperback ISBN: 9781496822475

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Donald-Hall 

Conversations with Donald Hall offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Hall’s evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a period of more than sixty years. Donald Hall (1928–2018) reveals vivid, funny, and moving anecdotes about T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the sculptor Henry Moore; he talks about his excitement on his return to New Hampshire and the joys of his marriage with Jane Kenyon; and he candidly discusses his loss and grief when Kenyon died in 1995 at the age of forty-seven.

The thirteen interviews range from a detailed exploration of the composition of “Ox Cart Man” to the poems that make up Without, an almost unbearable poetry of grief that was written following Jane Kenyon’s death. The book also follows Hall into old age, when he turned to essay writing and the reflections on aging that make up Essays after Eighty. This moving and insightful collection of interviews is crucial for anyone interested in poetry and the creative process, the techniques and achievements of modern American poetry, and the elusive psychology of creativity and loss.

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.

JOHN MARTIN-JOY is a psychiatrist and former book editor. He is author of Diagnosing from a Distance and several scholarly articles on literature and on psychiatry. ALLAN COOPER has been a full-time poet, translator, publisher, and editor for over forty years. RICHARD ROHFRITCH was educated at Wesleyan University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He is compiling and editing a new bibliography of Donald Hall, based in part on interviews with Hall at Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire.