A tribute to Morton P. Levitt, JML's editor-in-chief 1986-2005

 

© 1994, Temple University. Office of University Relations.

Morton P. Levitt (1936-2022), second editor of JML (1986-2005), died at home on September 10 of this year. Having worked closely with the founding editor Maurice Beebe from the journal’s inception in 1970, Mort (as he preferred to be called) self-identified as a “new critic,” though his form of it was the later New Criticism blended seamlessly with literary historical scholarship, especially focused on James Joyce and other international modernist writers, including Nikos Kazantzakis, about whom Mort wrote an important book: The Cretan Glance: The World and Art of Nikos Kazantzakis. Mort’s other books included Bloomsday: An Introduction to James Joyce's Ulysses; The Modernist Masters; Modernist Survivors; and The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction. With his wife Annette, a celebrated professor and scholar in her own right, he would welcome local, national, and international critics and writers (even critical theorists) into their home for parties where long-term friendships, not just connections, were made and sealed, an important project of civilization we now take for granted. 

As academic budgets began to be cut in the mid-nineties, Mort was able to search for a more stable publisher of JML and found one in Indiana University Press, which continues to provide loyal support for it. He also set up the transition to Ellen Rose as editor-in-chief as part of a new collective of editors that now jointly edits JML successfully on an expanded and more diversified basis. The journal owes the shape and substance of its present existence and of any future to come primarily to Mort, for whose foresight, wisdom, and friendship we are so grateful to have known and loved.

Book News: Woolf's engagement with science

Virginia Woolf, Science, Radio, and Identity 

BY CATRIONA LIVINGSTONE

Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781316514078

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/virginia-woolf-science-radio-and-identity?format=HB

This book offers an extensive analysis of Woolf's engagement with science. It demonstrates that science is integral to the construction of identity in Woolf's novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and identifies a little-explored source for Woolf's scientific knowledge: BBC scientific radio broadcasts. By analyzing this unstudied primary material, it traces the application of scientific concepts to questions of identity and highlights a single concept that is shared across multiple disciplines in the modernist period: the idea that modern science undermined individualized conceptions of the self. It broadens our understanding of the relationship between modernism and radio, modernism and science, and demonstrates the importance of science to Woolf's later novels.

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 Woolf's engagement with four areas of modernist science: quantum physics, neurology, radio, and evolutionary science
• Includes detailed accounts of early BBC science broadcasts
• Demonstrates that the popular science of the modernist period participates in the construction of multiple, expansive models of identity that is characteristic of modernist literature

Catriona Livingstone's work has appeared in Women: A Cultural Review, Woolf Studies Annual, and the Journal of Literature and Science. She co-organized the 2017 British Society for Literature and Science Winter Symposium, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Journal of Literature and Science/BSLS Essay Prize in 2017.

Book News: The poetry of lost modernist Joseph Macleod

Hidden Sun: The Poetry of Joseph Macleod (1903 – 1984)

BY JAMES FOUNTAIN

Waterloo Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-915241-01-6

https://waterloopress.co.uk/books/joseph-macleod/

Hidden Sun is the first ever complete critical volume on the work of neglected British poet Joseph Macleod.

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.

Macleod was a vital British modernist poet in the same circles as Basil Bunting and Ezra Pound who became famous behind the microphone at the BBC as WW2 wartime newsreader. Bunting thought Macleod's The Ecliptic, published by TS Eliot at Faber in 1930 at Ezra Pound’s insistence,  was the greatest poem since The Wasteland. Macleod wrote many other volumes of poetry as well as several books on Soviet theatre history. His best friends were Graham Greene, Adrian Stokes, Compton Mackenzie, Aldous Huxley and WS Graham. He corresponded with Pound for 40 years.

James Fountain explores the development of Macleod's poetic style from his high modernist long poem, The Ecliptic (1930), through to the five books of poetry written under the pseudonym ‘Adam Drinan’; significant critical chapters by Andrew Duncan complete the text.

James Fountain’s fine monograph about Joseph Macleod is welcome news to admirers of Macleod’s poetry, which includes not only the fascinating modernist long poem The Ecliptic but the very different and better-known poems he published as Adam Drinan. Macleod’s poetry deserves more readers, and this book should help his work find them. --Keith Tuma, Miami University

James Fountain (and Andrew Duncan) explore why such a gifted poet has almost vanished from the story of British Modernism, and confidently reclaim his place. Based on original archival research, this book opens a new and exciting vista on a gifted poet and his troubled times. --James McGonigal, University of Glasgow

…this excellent account of Macleod should place him back into the public arena as a key modernist voice… James Fountain brings this forgotten voice alive, and offers us the chance to take up the challenge as the 21st century readership this poet so deserves. --Adam Piette, University of Sheffield

James Fountain (and Andrew Duncan) offer here an admirably lucid and companionable commentary on his works, drawing out the extraordinarily diverse elements that constituted his singular voice: by turns mythical, modernist, anthropological, socialist, populist, Scots. A poet who was regarded by writers as various as Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, and W.S. Graham is here handsomely recovered for a modern readership.  --Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford

Book News: Misdirection in Noir film and fiction

Noir Fiction and Film: Diversions and Misdirections

BY LEE CLARK MITCHELL

Oxford UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780192844767

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/noir-fiction-and-film-9780192844767?cc=us&lang=en&#

The argument of Noir Fiction and Film is curiously counterintuitive: that in a century of hard-boiled fiction and detective films, characteristics that at first seemed trivial swelled in importance, flourishing into crucial aspects of the genre. Among these are aimless descriptions of people and places irrelevant to plot, along with detectives consisting of little more than sparkling dialogue and flippant attitudes. What weaves together such features, however, seems to be a paradox: that a genre rooted in solving a mystery, structured around the gathering of clues, must do so by misdirecting our attention, even withholding information we think we need to generate the suspense we also desire. Yet successful noir stories and films enhance that suspense through passing diversions (descriptive details and eccentric perspectives) rather than depending on the center pieces of plot alone (suspected motives or incriminating traces). 

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.

As the greatest practitioners of the genre have realized, the "how" of detective fiction (its stylistic detours) draws us in more insistently than the "what" or the "who" (its linear advance). And the achievement of recent film noir is to make that "how" become the tantalizing object of our entire attention, shorn of any pretense of reading for the plot, immersing us in the diversionary delight that has animated the genre from the beginning.

Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, where he has served as Chair of the English Department and Director of the Program in American Studies. He teaches courses in American literature and film, with recent essays focusing on Cormac McCarthy, John Williams, the Coen brothers, and Edith Wharton. His recent books include Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels (Bloomsbury, 2017), Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre (Nebraska, 2018), and More Time: Contemporary Short Stories and Late Styles (Oxford, 2018).

Book News: Interviews with innovative Choctaw author LeAnne Howe

Conversations with LeAnne Howe

EDITED BY KIRSTIN L. SQUINT

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496836441

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-LeAnne-Howe

Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award–winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association’s first Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013).

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.

Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in this collection delve deeply into Howe’s poetics, her innovative critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and her position on subjects ranging from the Lone Ranger to Native American mascots. Two previously unpublished interviews, “‘An American in New York’: LeAnne Howe” (2019) and “Genre-Sliding on Stage with LeAnne Howe” (2020), explore unexamined areas of her personal history and how it impacted her creative work, including childhood trauma and her incubation as a playwright in the 1980s. These conversations along with 2019’s Occult Poetry Radio interview also give important insights on the background of Howe’s newest critically acclaimed work, Savage Conversations (2019), about Mary Todd Lincoln’s hallucination of a “Savage Indian” during her time in Bellevue Place sanitarium. Taken as a whole, Conversations with LeAnne Howe showcases the development and continued impact of one of the most important Indigenous American writers of the twenty-first century.

Kirstin L. Squint is the Whichard Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Humanities (2019–2022) and associate professor of English, specializing in Native American literatures, at East Carolina University. She is author of LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature and coeditor of Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies. She is also a contributor to Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to “Hillbilly Elegy,” winner of the 2020 American Book Award for criticism.

Book News: Ideology and form in Cold War era world literature

The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures 

EDITED BY FRANCESCA ORSINI, NEELAM SRIVASTAVA AND LAETITIA ZECCHINI                  

Open Book Publishers, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-80064-190-7 PDF

(open access electronic; purchase ebook and print below)

https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0254

 

This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War.

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 essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms.                 

With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.

             

Francesca Orsini is professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian literatures at SOAS, University of London and was Principal Investigator of the MULOSIGE project.

Neelam Srivastava is professor of postcolonial literature and world literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University (UK).

Laetitia Zecchini is senior research fellow (Chargée de recherche) at the CNRS in Paris (France) and visiting scholar at Boston University (USA).

Book News: The "craft labor" metaphor and literary production

Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture

BY CHRISTOPHER KEMPF

Johns Hopkins UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-1421443560

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12763/craft-class

The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor.

In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term "workshop" for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model.

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 Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—a space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism.

Delineating an arc that extends from Boston's fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, Kempf shows, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? And on whose behalf does the poet punch in?

Challenging conventional histories of arts and crafts ideology, Craft Class offers a provocative genealogy of the creative writing workshop. Creative writers, in addition to scholars of contemporary American literature, will find this well-written book appealing.   -- John Marsh, Pennsylvania State University, author of Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry

Kempf performs a wonderful excavation of the meaning of the 'workshop' for the discipline of creative writing, demonstrating how it arose as a deeply human response to the problem of alienated labor in an industrial capitalist society. In a series of brilliantly chosen and illuminating case studies, he discloses the true historical significance of the craft ideal nurtured in such spaces, reawakening us to the utopian energies that circulate in the writing classroom even now.   -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

Christopher Kempf is a visiting assistant professor in creative writing at the University of Illinois. Recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and a PhD in English literature from the University of Chicago, he is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost and Late in the Empire of Men.