Book News: Vertical ascension and growing anxiety in 20th century literature

 The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism

BY PAUL HAACKE

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780198851448 hardback

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-vertical-imagination-and-the-crisis-of-transatlantic-modernism-9780198851448?cc=us&lang=en&#

From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history.

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 wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as direct indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of "high" and "low."

• Rethinks modernist discourse from the rise of the twentieth century to the post-1945 and post-9/11 periods
• Shows how technologies, ideologies, and metaphors of verticality became central for re-envisioning the meaning of modernity
• Develops a comparative approach to major and lesser-known works of European and American literature as well as intellectual and cultural history, architecture, and film
• Engages with inter-disciplinary work in critical theory, urban and environmental studies, film and media studies, transnationalism and empire, and new materialisms and secularisms
• Studies a wide range of authors including Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Aimé Césaire, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko

Paul Haacke has taught at UC Berkeley, New York University, and the Pratt Institute. His academic writing has appeared in a range of publications, including diacritics, French Forum, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Book News: Odysseys in Global Modernism

Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection

BY MICHELLE ZERBA

Ohio State UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1464-0 Hardback

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214640.html

Michelle Zerba’s Modern Odysseys explores three major writers in global modernism from the Mediterranean, Anglo-European Britain, and the Caribbean whose groundbreaking literary works have never been studied together before. Using language as an instrument of revolution and social change, C. P. Cavafy, Virginia Woolf, and Aimé Césaire gave expression to the forms of human experience we now associate with modernity: homoeroticism, transsexuality, and racial consciousness. More specifically, Zerba argues that Odyssean tropes of diffusion, isolation, passage, and return give form to works by these writers but in ways that invite us to reconsider and revise the basic premises of reception studies and intellectual history.

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.

Combining close readings of literary texts with the study of interviews, essays, diaries, and letters, Zerba advances a revisionary account of how to approach relationships between antiquity and modernity. Instead of frontal encounters with the Odyssey, Cavafy, Woolf, and Césaire indirectly—but no less significantly—engage with Homer’s epic poem. In demonstrating how such encounters operate, Modern Odysseys explores issues of race and sexuality that connect antiquity with the modern period.

“In addition to being riveting to read, Modern Odysseys offers readers a compelling new framework for thinking about the emergence of counter subjectivities within international modernism and enlivens scholarly debates about the modern afterlives of Homer’s Odyssey. The author’s intellectual flair, theoretical verve, and impressive range all command attention.” —Emily Greenwood, author of Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

“The book’s distinctiveness and charm are enhanced by the author’s clarity and usefulness. Modern Odysseys makes a valuable intervention in the popular subfield of reception studies within classics.” —Alexander Beecroft, author of Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation

Michelle Zerba is the Maggie B. Martin Professor of Rhetoric and Classical Studies at Louisiana State University.

Book News: First collection of interviews with poet Dana Gioia

Conversations with Dana Gioia

EDITED BY JOHN ZHENG

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4968-3204-7 Paper

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Dana-Gioia

“Like all art, poetry makes us more alert and attentive to the mystery of our own lives.”  --Dana Gioia

Conversations with Dana Gioia is the first collection of interviews with the internationally known poet and public intellectual, covering every stage of his busy, polymathic career. Dana Gioia (b. 1950) has made many contributions to contemporary American literature and culture, including but not limited to crafting a personal poetic style suited to the age; leading the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative through New Formalism; walloping the “intellectual ghetto” of American poetry through his epochal article “Can Poetry Matter?”; helping American poetry move forward by organizing influential conferences; providing public service and initiating nationwide arts projects such as Poetry Out Loud through his leadership of the National Endowment for the Arts; and editing twenty best-selling literary anthologies widely used in American classrooms.

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.

Taken together, the twenty-two collected interviews increase our understanding of Gioia’s poetry and poetics, offer aesthetic pleasure in themselves, and provide a personal encounter with a writer who has made poetry matter. The book presents the actual voice of Dana Gioia, who speaks of his personal and creative life and articulates his unique vision of American culture and poetry.

"Conversations with Dana Gioia is an extraordinary book, one that serves as a sort of instant autobiography of Gioia. It is as evocative and fascinating as the only comparable book by and about a poet of which I am aware: Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O’Driscoll (2008).... In addition to the twenty-two interviews reprinted in the book, Conversations with Dana Gioia contains three valuable research tools: the most elaborate list of works by Gioia that I have seen anywhere, a major bibliography of works about Gioia, and a chronology of his life to date. The result is an extraordinary book full of human interest and historic value." -- Carl Jenks, Poetry Corner

JOHN ZHENG is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University and editor of Conversations with Sterling Plumpp; The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku; and African American Haiku: Cultural Visions; as well as coeditor (with Biling Chen) of Conversations with Gish Jen, all published by University Press of Mississippi. His work has also been published in such journals as African American Review, East-West Connections, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, Paideuma, and Southern Quarterly. 

Book News: Japanese Modernism's roots in Buddhism

The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction:
Path Literature and an Interpretation of Buddhism

BY MICHIHIRO AMA

SUNY Press, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8141-8 hardback

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8142-5 paperback

https://www.sunypress.edu/p-7022-the-awakening-of-modern-japanes.aspx

The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction is the first book to treat the literary practices of certain major modern Japanese writers as Buddhist practices, and to read their work as Buddhist literature. Its distinctive contribution is its focus on modern literature and, importantly, modern Buddhism, which Michihiro Ama presents both as existing in continuity with the historical Buddhist tradition and as having unique features of its own. Ama corrects the dominant perception in which the Christian practice of confession has been accepted as the primary informing source of modern Japanese prose literature, arguing instead that the practice has always been a part of Shin Buddhist 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.

Focusing on personal fiction, this volume explores the works of literary figures and Buddhist priests who, challenged by the modern development of Japan, turned to Buddhism in a variety of ways and used literature as a vehicle for transforming their sense of selfhood. Writers discussed include Natsume Sōseki, Tayama Katai, Shiga Naoya, Kiyozawa Manshi, and Akegarasu Haya. By bringing Buddhism out of the shadows of early twentieth-century Japanese literature and elucidating its presence in both individual authors’ lives and the genre of autobiographical fiction, The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction demonstrates a more nuanced understanding of the role of Buddhism in the development of Japanese modernity.

Michihiro Ama is Karashima Tsukasa Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at the University of Montana. He is the author of Immigrants to the Pure Land: The Modernization, Acculturation, and Globalization of Shin Buddhism, 1898–1941.

Book News: Reappraising Muriel Spark's early works

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form

BY JAMES BAILEY

Edinburgh UP, March 2021

ISBN: 9781474475969 hardback

9781474475990 ePub

9781474475983 PDF

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-muriel-spark-s-early-fiction.html

A compelling reappraisal of Spark’s approach to literary experimentation

• Offers a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, which challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing
• Interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique
• Presents nuanced re-readings of some of Spark’s major works, as well as lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories
• Draws upon detailed archival research to offer a unique insight into the social contexts and personal preoccupations that informed Spark’s writing

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction.

Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction is a magnificent achievement, bursting with revealing and original insights into Spark’s fiction and the enduring preoccupations and working methods of this most singular author. The result is a welcome addition to the process Spark scholars have embarked upon in recent years: extricating (or ‘desegregating’) the author from the various literary-critical categories that once confined her. Bailey’s approach is flexible and multi-faceted by contrast, and draws on an impressively extensive use of previously unexamined archival material. The reader is provided with illuminating explorations of ‘instances of narrative daring’ during the first two decades of Spark’s career which range from under-examined early short stories to key texts such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Driver’s Seat, and place the emphasis on her enduring commitment to highlight the ways women become inscribed in oppressive cultural narratives. It is a rich and readable monograph which lives up to its ambition to establish a more complex and appropriate framework to discuss Spark in our current critical era, and will therefore be essential reading for those embarking on future studies of one of the most brilliant and unusual writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

– Bran Nicol, University of Surrey

James Bailey is honorary research fellow in English literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the co-editor, with Emma Young, of British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) as well as author of articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing and European Journal of English Studies.

Ray Bradbury's Afrofuturist Mars

 

JML author Steve Gronert Ellerhoff discusses the background of his research on Ray Bradbury's anti-racism at work in two science fiction short stories, in a post for Indiana University Press, available HERE.

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

"White Supremacy and the Multicultural Imagination in Ray Bradbury's Afrofuturist Stories of Mars." Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 44, no. 4, Summer 2021, pp. 1-18.

JML 44.4 (Summer 2021) is LIVE!

 

JML 44.4 (Summer 2021) is now available. Find it on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.44.issue-4 and on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/46333

Crossing the boundaries of race and culture

Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

White Supremacy and the Multicultural Imagination in Ray Bradbury’s Afrofuturist Stories of Mars

FREE!

Victoria Googasian 

Zora Neale Hurston and the Limits of the Will to Humanize

Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Intersectional Feminism, Black Love, and the Transnational Turn: Rereading Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain 

Chiaki Kayaba

Inadequate Compensation: Economic Agency against the Plantation System in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses 

T.J. Boynton

“The man’s a man if he is black”: Conrad, Modernism, and Race (Again)

Nicole Winsor

“Like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies”: Katherine Mansfield’s and Una Marson’s Modernist Fantasies of Objecthood

Paul Allen Miller

On Borders, Race, and Infinite Hospitality: Foucault, Derrida, and Camus

Aled Rees

The Hispanic World in the Multilingual Fiction of Colm Tóibín

Jeffrey Mather

Rising Stars and Fallen Women: Writing Lives in Emily Hahn’s China

Angelia Poon

Re-invention in a Globalized World: (Mis)reading and Metafictional Strategies in Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire 

Qingyuan Jiang

Scaling Holy Mountains: Mountaineering, Religion, and the Politics of Literature in Auden and Empson 

Charles Lock

Negotiating the eruv