Book News: Poetic justice in modern Ireland

Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland

BY ADAM HANNA 

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815637615

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/4769/poetry-politics-and-the-law-in-modern-ireland/

A compelling look at the role of legal developments and controversies in shaping modern Irish poetry.

Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland is a richly detailed exploration of how modern Irish poetry has been shaped by, and responded to, the laws, judgments, and constitutions of both of the island’s jurisdictions. Focusing on poets’ responses in their writing to such contentious legal issues as partition, censorship, paramilitarism, and the curtailment of women’s reproductive and other rights, this monograph is the first in the growing field of law and literature to focus exclusively on modern Ireland. Hanna unpacks the legal engagements of both major and non-canonical poets from every decade between the 1920s and the present day, including Rhoda Coghill, Austin Clarke, Paul Durcan, Elaine Feeney, Miriam Gamble, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan, Julie Morrissy, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and W. B. Yeats.

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.

Poetry from the time of independence onwardhas been shaped by two opposing forces. On the one hand, the Irish public has traditionally had strong expectations that poets offer a dissenting counter-discourse to official sources of law. On the other hand, poets have more recently expressed skepticism about the ethics of speaking for others and about the adequacy of art in performing a public role. Hanna’s fascinating study illuminates the poetry that arises from these antithetical modern conditions.

"I was hooked from the word go . . . . this pioneering book develops a strong case for the engagement of poetry and law in Ireland. It opens up in a genuinely original and intellectually nuanced way the resonant overlap between legal, constitutional and ethical concerns in Irish poetry since Yeats."—Hugh Haughton, Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literatures at the University of York

"Poetry, Politics, and Law in Modern Ireland is a major achievement. Combining the rigours of quite brilliant close readings with an attention to the various legal and extra-legal contexts that help shape the work of Ireland's modern poets, Hanna reveals the jurisprudential unconscious of the literary and the cultural after-life of the law."—Eugene McNulty, Dublin City University

"This is a book about poetic justice itself, about how the acknowledged legislations of poetry act as conscience and arbitrator for the failings of laws—and their inevitable repeal. Hanna's scholarship has an ambition of breadth and reach that means it should be read by lawyers, historians and political scientists—but above all it should be read by poets and their readers, as an argument for the seriousness of Irish poetic engagement with the laws of the country, South and North."—Matthew Campbell, University of York

Adam Hanna is a lecturer in the English Department at University College Cork. He is the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space and the coeditor of Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Art and Literature from Classical to Contemporary and Law and Literature: The Irish Case.

Book News: Children in hemispheric American Gothic fiction

Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas

BY SUZANNE MANIZZA ROSZAK 

University of Wales Press, 2022

ISBN: 9781786838667

https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/uncanny-youth/

A literary study of childhood in the American Gothic. 

Childhood in Gothic literature has often served colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal ideologies, but in Uncanny Youth, Suzanne Manizza Roszak highlights hemispheric American writers who subvert these scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Tracey Baptiste, Gothic conventions critique systems of power in the Americas. As fictional children confront shifting configurations of imperialism and patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, their uncanny stories call on readers to reckon with intersecting forms of injustice.

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.

‘Mining an impressive array of Gothic texts – including novels, short stories, plays, and literature written for young adult audiences – Uncanny Youth deftly argues for the subversive and revolutionary power of child and teen characters who confront (and only sometimes survive) the devastating impacts of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide.’ --Bridget M. Marshall, associate professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Suzanne Manizza Roszak is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Book News: Woolf's invocation of Greek mythology

Virginia Woolf's Mythic Method

BY AMY C. SMITH

Ohio State UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1513-5

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215135.html

In Virginia Woolf’s Mythic Method, Smith reinvigorates scholarly analysis of myth in Virginia Woolf’s fiction by examining how Woolf engaged social and political issues in her work. Through close readings of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts, Smith argues that Woolf develops a paratactic method of alluding to Greek myth that is shaped by the style of archaic oral literature and her intersectional feminist insights. By revising such famously paradoxical figures as the Great Goddess, the Eleusinian deities, Dionysus, Odysseus, and the Sirens, Woolf illustrates the links between epistemological and metaphysical assumptions and war, empire, patriarchy, capitalism, and fascism.

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.

At the same time, her use of parataxis to invoke ancient myth unsettles authorial control and empowers readers to participate in making meaning out of her juxtaposed fragments. In contrast to T. S. Eliot’s more prominent mythic method, which seeks to control the anarchy of modern life, Woolf’s paratactic method envisions more livable forms of sociality by destabilizing meaning in her novels, an agenda that aligns better with our contemporary understandings of modernism.

“Virginia Woolf’s Mythic Method is a fresh, nuanced, and innovative examination of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts viewed through the dual lenses of myth and modernism. Smith’s richly layered analysis and excellent scholarly sources position this book to shape future interpretations of Woolf’s work.”     —Vara Neverow, editor of Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Amy C. Smith is associate professor of English at Lamar University.

Howe It Is: A Closer Look at JML 45.4

 

Take a closer look at JML 45.4. Author Stefania Heim shares how an interview with Susan Howe in 2011 began her journey toward her current research in THIS POST for the Indiana University Press blog. 

Her essay, “‘I for i and i for I’: Susan Howe’s That This and the Relational Self” is now available for FREE on Project Muse.

JML 45.4 (Summer 2022) "The Matter of Poetry" is LIVE!

JML 45.4 (Summer 2022) on the theme "The Matter of Poetry" is now available on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48858.

Content includes:

Modernist renegotiations 

Espen Grønlie

Linguistic Relativism and Poetry: Ezra Pound’s Reading of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl as a Key to Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry

Tiao Wang and Ronald Schleifer

Ezra Pound and Mang Ke (芒克): Image, Affect, and Consumerism in Western and Chinese Modernism

Joseph Pizza

“All Aboard for Natchez, Cairo, and St. Louis”: Minstrelsy and Conversion in T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday

Nathaniel Mills

John Berryman’s Blackface Jokes: The Insights of Literary Failure 

Harold Schweizer

On Gentleness: Rilke’s Hands

Tradition, lamentation, and individual talent

Wit Pietrzak

“Her songs are raised like fists”: The Caoineadh Tradition in Paul Muldoon’s Lamentations 

Dalia Bolotnikov Mazur

Charles Reznikoff's Testimony of the Dead

Stefania Heim

“I for i and i for I”: Susan Howe’s That This and the Relational Self 

FREE

Marty Cain

Frank Stanford’s Rural Avant-Garde: Infrastructure, Mediation, and Poetic Community

Nate Mickelson

Composing in the Future Particular: Reading CAConrad’s (Soma)tics

Review

Stefania Heim

The Matter of Poetry 

Book News: creative women of the Iranian diaspora

 Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora

BY MEHRANEH EBRAHIMI

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815636557

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/104/women-art-and-literature-in-the-iranian-diaspora/

Does the study of aesthetics have tangible effects in the real world? Does examining the work of diaspora writers and artists change our view of “the Other”? In this thoughtful book, Ebrahimi argues that an education in the humanities is as essential as one in politics and ethics, critically training the imagination toward greater empathy. Despite the surge in Iranian memoirs, their contributions to debunking an abstract idea of terror and their role in encouraging democratic thinking remain understudied. In examining creative work by women of Iranian descent, Ebrahimi argues that Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, and Parsua Bashi make the Other familiar and break a cycle of reactionary xenophobia. These authors, instead of relying on indignation, build imaginative bridges in their work that make it impossible to blame one evil, external enemy. Ebrahimi explores both classic and hybrid art forms, including graphic novels and photo-poetry, to advocate for the importance of aesthetics to inform and influence a global community. Drawing on the theories of Rancière, Butler, Arendt, and Levinas, Ebrahimi identifies the ways in which these works give a human face to the Other, creating the space and language to imagine a new political and ethical landscape.

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 is an ambitious, sharply political argument about the urgent stakes of representation that maintains a laser-sharp focus on detail when discussing the individual works in both their textual and visual registers."—Iranian Studies

"Ebrahimi’s book adds to expanding the field of Iranian diaspora studies, as it tackles the relationship between aesthetics and politics through a liberatory lens. Given our current political moment, works such as Ebrahimi’s are a welcome addition to thinking through the subversive potential of cultural representation in the Iranian diaspora."—International Journal of Middle East Studies

"This book makes an important contribution to cultural studies in that it steers us away from only making a paranoid critique of our world and instead reaches to the possibility of ethical democracy."—Dina Georgis, author of The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East

Mehraneh Ebrahimi is assistant professor of English at York University where she teaches courses in diaspora and world literature. Her research focus is on Middle Eastern literature in light of the ongoing "war on terror."

Book News: Recasting the Soviet Jew

How the Soviet Jew Was Made 

BY SASHA SENDEROVICH

Harvard UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780674238190

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674238190

This close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity.

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 Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life.

This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew—not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. There is the Siberian settler of Viktor Fink’s Jews in the Taiga, the folkloric trickster of Isaac Babel, and the fragmented, bickering family of Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zemlenyaners, whose insular lives are disrupted by the march of technological, political, and social change. There is the collector of ethnographic tidbits, the pogrom survivor, the émigré who repatriates to the USSR.

Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former empire. Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life, all embodied in the novel cultural figure of the Soviet Jew. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew as a particular kind of liminal being as he offers a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

—Alice Nakhimovsky, author of Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America

Sasha Senderovich is assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is also an affiliate of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. With Harriet Murav, he translated the Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s novel Judgment. Senderovich has written on contemporary fiction by Russian Jewish émigré authors in the United States including Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, David Bezmozgis, and Irina Reyn.