Book News: Lyotard's groundbreaking lectures on "infantia" now in English

Readings in Infancy

BY JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD

EDITED BY ROBERT HARVEY AND KIFF BAMFORD

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350167360

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/readings-in-infancy-9781350167360/

"Nobody knows how to write." Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one of the most important writer-philosophers of the twentieth century, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French in 1991 as Lectures d'enfance, these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. In them, Lyotard investigates his idea of infantia, or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, either human or technological.

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.

Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sigmund Freud. This volume – with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford – contextualizes Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

Contents include:

• Foreword, Robert Harvey 
• "Infans," translated by Mary Lydon
• "Return: Joyce," translated by Robert Harvey & Mark S. Roberts.
• "Prescription: Kafka," translated by Christopher Fynsk
• "Survivor: Arendt," translated by Robert Harvey & Mark S. Roberts
• "Words: Sartre," translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
• "Disorder: Valéry," translated by Robert Harvey
• "Voices: Freud," translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele
• Afterword, Kiff Bamford 

Robert Harvey is distinguished professor emeritus at Stony Brook University. His most recent books are Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017) (translations in Japanese and French forthcoming in 2020), a translation of Deguy's To That Which Ends Not: Threnody (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics (Continuum, 2010), which appeared in French as Témoignabilité (MetisPresses, 2015), and De l’exception à la règle (Éditions Lignes, 2006) on USA PATRIOT Act. He is a major co-editor of the Œuvres complètes of Marguerite Duras in the Pléiade edition with Gallimard.

Kiff Bamford is reader in contemporary art at Leeds Beckett University, with research interests in performance art and continental philosophy. He has published widely on the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard with a focus on the inter-relationship between art and philosophy. Monographs include: Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2017) and  Lyotard and the figural in Performance, Art and Writing (Continuum, 2012). Bamford edited and introduced the collection Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (Bloomsbury, 2020). 

Book News: Women modernists' collaborations with men

 Modernist Literary Collaborations between Women and Men

BY RUSSELL MCDONALD

Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781009070973

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/modernist-literary-collaborations-between-women-and-men/

Major figures including W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf viewed "cross-sex" collaboration as a valuable, and often subversive, strategy for bringing women and men's differing perspectives into productive dialogue while harnessing the creative potential of gendered discord. This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to "make it new." 

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.

Drawing on current methods from textual scholarship to read modernist texts as material, socially constructed products of multiple hands, the study argues that cross-sex collaboration involved writers working not just with each other, but also with publishers and illustrators. By documenting and tracing the contours of their desire for cross-sex collaboration, we gain a new understanding of the modernists' thinking about sex and gender relations, as well as three related topics of great interest to them: marriage, androgyny, and genius.

Russell McDonald is associate professor of English at Georgian Court University. His articles and reviews have appeared in Textual Cultures, Irish Studies Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, New Hibernia Review, and Comparative Literature Studies.

Book News: Charting new territories in Rhys studies

Transnational Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission, Lines of Flight

Edited by Juliana Lopoukhine, Frédéric Regard, and Kerry-Jane Wallart

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

ISBN: 9781501371653

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/transnational-jean-rhys-9781501371653/

This volume investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys's entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment.

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.

Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys's writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign – especially French – authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.

Juliana Lopoukhine is senior lecturer in English studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. She has published various chapters and articles on women modernist writers (Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Rose Macaulay), a critical edition of Mrs Dalloway (2013), and co-edited three issues of L’Atelier (2016, 2019, 2020). She wrote her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Chantal Delourme and Scott McCracken and received her PhD from the Université de Paris-Nanterre, France and Keele University, UK.

Frédéric Regard is professor of 19th- and 20th-century English literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. He is the author of books on William Golding, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and 'feminine writing', as well as countless peer-reviewed articles. He also edited collections of essays on life-writing and exploration narratives. His latest work, Le Détective était une femme (2018), bears on gender issues in the genesis of the detective novel as a genre.

Kerry-Jane Wallart is professor in Black Atlantic studies at the University of Orléans, France. Her Alma Mater is the École Normale Supérieure Ulm and she has been a Procter Fellow at Princeton University. She has published over 30 book chapters and articles, co-edited an issue of Sillages Critiques (2019), an issue of Revue de Littérature Comparée (2017), a volume on Jamaica Kincaid, published by Wagadu in 2018, and edited three issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2019, 2012 and 2009).

Book News: Creative writing programs, rebels in the academy

Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities

BY LISE JAILLANT

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192855305

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/literary-rebels-9780192855305

How many times have you heard that creative writing programs are factories that produce the same kind of writers, isolated from real life? Only by escaping academia can writers be completely free. Universities are profoundly conservative places, designed to favor a certain way of writing--preferably informed by literary theory. Those who reject the creative/ critical discourse of academia are the true rebels, condemned to live (or survive) in a tough literary marketplace. Conformity is on the side of academia, the story goes, and rebellion is on the other side.

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 book argues against the notion that creative writing programs are driven by conformity. Instead, it shows that these programs in the United States and Britain were founded and developed by literary outsiders, who left an enduring mark on their discipline. To this day, creative writing occupies a marginal position in Anglo-American universities. The multiplication of new programs, accompanied by rising student enrolments, has done nothing to change that positioning. 

As a discipline, creative writing strives on opposition to the mainstream university, while benefiting from what the university has to offer. Historically, this opposition to scholars was so virulent that it often led to the separation of creative writing and literature departments. The Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in the 1930s, separated from the English department three decades later--and it still occupies a different building on campus, with little communication between writers and scholars. This model of institutional division is less common in Britain, where the discipline formally emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But even when creative writing is located within literature departments, relationships with scholars remain uneasy. Creative writers and scholars are not, and have never been, natural bedfellows.

• The first history of creative writing programs in Britain and America
• Sheds new light on the relationship between writers and scholars from the 1930s to the present day
• Draws on extensive work in neglected archives and oral history interviews with distinguished creative writers
• Offers a new model of scholarship in hybrid archives, comprising paper and born-digital documents

Lise Jaillant is senior lecturer (associate professor) in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. She specializes in twentieth-century literary institutions, with a special interest in publishers and creative writing programs. She is author of Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 (Routledge, 2014) and Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde (EUP, 2017) and editor of Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (EUP, 2019). Taken together, these three books offer a broad overview of Anglo-American publishers in the early-twentieth-century, and their influence on the diffusion of modern literature.

Book News: Southern women writers' short story collections and their framing strategies

Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers

BY HEATHER A. FOX

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496840516 hardcover, 9781496840509 paperback

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Arranging-Stories

A riveting history of how southern women writers negotiated authorial control in the late nineteenth- through early twentieth-century periodical market

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, opportunities for southern white women writers increased dramatically, bolstered by readers’ demands for southern stories in northern periodicals. Confined by magazine requirements and social expectations, writers often relied on regional settings and tropes to attract publishers and readers before publishing work in a collection. Selecting and ordering magazine stories for these collections was not arbitrary or dictated by editors, despite a male-dominated publishing industry. Instead, it allowed writers to privilege stories, or to contextualize a story by its proximity to other tales, as a form of social commentary. For Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Katherine Anne Porter—the authors featured in this book—publishing a volume of stories enabled them to construct a narrative framework of their own.

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.

Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers is as much about how stories are constructed as how they are told. The book examines correspondence, manuscripts, periodicals, and first editions of collections. Each collection’s textual history serves as a case study for changes in the periodical marketplace and demonstrates how writers negotiated this marketplace to publish stories and garner readership. The book also includes four tables, featuring collected stories’ arrangements and publication histories, and twenty-five illustrations, featuring periodical publications, unpublished letters, and manuscript fragments obtained from nine on-site and digital archives. Short story collections guide readers through a spatial experience, in which both individual stories and the ordering of those stories become a framework for interpreting meaning. Arranging Stories invites readings that complicate how we engage collected works.

"Drawing heavily on archival materials, including reproductions of many photographs, letters, manuscript pages, and other materials, Arranging Stories is a treasure trove of previously unreleased materials that sheds important light on these authors and their works. It draws attention to the amount of agency that these authors wielded over their work, in ways that we haven't previously considered."  - Monica Carol Miller, author of Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion

"With impeccable research, Arranging Stories reveals the struggles of early women writers working for acceptance and agency within a patriarchal publishing world dominated by White men."  - Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review

Heather A. Fox is assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. Her work in southern studies has appeared in south, Southern Studies, Janus Head, The Explicator, and the Faulkner Journal.

Book News: First scholarly collection examining Edwidge Danticat's full range of works

Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat

EDITED BY MAIA L. BUTLER, JOANNA DAVIS-MCELLIGATT, AND MEGAN FEIFER

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496839886

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/N/Narrating-History-Home-and-Dyaspora

Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat contains fifteen essays addressing how Edwidge Danticat’s writing, anthologizing, and storytelling trace, (re)construct, and develop alternate histories, narratives of nation building, and conceptions of home and belonging. The prolific Danticat is renowned for novels, collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and editorial writing. As her experimentation in form expands, so does her force as a public intellectual. Danticat’s literary representations, political commentary, and personal activism have proven vital to classroom and community work imagining radical futures. Among increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and containment and rampant ecological volatility, Danticat’s contributions to public discourse, art, and culture deserve sustained critical attention. These essays offer essential perspectives to scholars, public intellectuals, and students interested in African diasporic, Haitian, Caribbean, and transnational American literary studies. This collection frames Danticat’s work as an indictment of statelessness, racialized and gendered state violence, and the persistence of political and economic margins.

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 first section of this volume, “The Other Side of the Water,” engages with Danticat’s construction and negotiation of nation, both in Haiti and the United States; the broader dyaspora; and her own, her family’s, and her fictional characters’ places within them. The second section, “Welcoming Ghosts,” delves into the ever-present specter of history and memory, prominent themes found throughout Danticat’s work. From origin stories to broader Haitian histories, this section addresses the underlying traumas involved when remembering the past and its relationship to the present. The third section, “I Speak Out,” explores the imperative to speak, paying particular attention to the narrative form with which such telling occurs. The fourth and final section, “Create Dangerously,” contends with Haitians’ activism, community building, and the political and ecological climate of Haiti and its dyaspora.

"Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora is an in-depth interdisciplinary collection of essays that engages the corpus of Edwidge Danticat in all its dimensions: novelist, short fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, activist, and public intellectual. The book also brings these different aspects of her work together by bringing to light the alternate histories and historiographies this extraordinary storyteller maps out in her work. " - Carine M. Mardorossian, author of Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism

"Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora accomplishes a sustained interrogation of Danticat's canon—including her most recent works—in ways that lay the critical foundation not only for a reappraisal of the author's writing, but also for her place within the larger discursive nexus of African diaspora writing or immigrant literature. Such a work is long overdue, and it makes a case for itself as the most exhaustive treatment of Danticat's expanding literary output." - Maxine Lavon Montgomery, editor of Conversations with Edwidge Danticat

Maia L. Butler is assistant professor of African American literature at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is also affiliate faculty in women’s and gender studies and Africana studies. She is a literary geographer researching and teaching in African American/diasporic, Anglophone postcolonial, and American (broadly conceived) studies, with an emphasis on Black women’s literature and feminist theories.

Joanna Davis-McElligatt is assistant professor of Black literary and cultural studies in the Department of English at the University of North Texas, where she is affiliate faculty in women’s and gender studies. She is coeditor of Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy.

Megan Feifer is assistant professor of English at Medaille College in New York. Her research and teaching addresses Afro-Caribbean diasporas in the US, multiethnic literatures, postcolonial literature and theory, and feminist theories.

Book News: Modernist writers wrestle with Freud's legacy

Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis

BY JENNIFER SPITZER

Fordham UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781531502102

https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531502102/secret-sharers/

Secret Sharers traces a genealogy of secret sharing between literary modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on the productive entanglements and intense competitive rivalries that helped shape Anglo-American modernism as a field. As Jennifer Spitzer reveals, such rivalries played out in explicit criticism, inventive misreadings, and revisions of Freudian forms—from D. H. Lawrence’s re-descriptions of the unconscious to Vladimir Nabokov’s parodies of the psychoanalytic case study. While some modernists engaged directly with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis with unmistakable rivalry and critique, others wrestled in more complex ways with Freud’s legacy. The key protagonists of this study—D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov—are noteworthy for the way they engaged with, popularized, and revised the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, while also struggling with it as an encroaching discourse. Modernists read psychoanalysis, misread psychoanalysis, and sometimes refused to read it altogether, while expressing anxiety about being read by psychoanalysis—subjecting themselves and their art to psychoanalytic interpretations.

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 analysts, such as Freud, Ernest Jones, and Alfred Kuttner, turned to literature and art to illustrate psychoanalytic theories, modernists sought to counter such reductive narratives by envisioning competing formulations of the relationship between literature and psychic life. Modernists often expressed ambivalence about the probing, symptomatic style of psychoanalytic interpretation and responded with a re-doubling of arguments for aesthetic autonomy, formal self-consciousness, and amateurism. Secret Sharers reveals how modernists transformed the hermeneutic and diagnostic priorities of psychoanalysis into novel aesthetic strategies and distinctive modes of epistemological and critical engagement. In reassessing the historical and intellectual legacies of modernism, this book suggests that modernist responses to psychoanalytic criticism anticipate more recent critical debates about the value of “symptomatic” reading and the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

If modernism was anything, it was a literature of consciousness. For that reason, Freud and psychoanalysis have long been seen as crucial context to the literary innovations of the early twentieth century. Secret Sharers, however, troubles received notions about the role of Freud within literary modernism, offering a new narrative in which modernism was shaped by an engagement that was both anxious and constitutive. Jennifer Spitzer’s book is a timely invitation to reexamine modernism’s fundamental concerns and their bearing on the work we do as literary critics.---Timothy Wientzen, author of Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex

Spitzer moves beyond standard accounts of literary modernism’s debt to Freud to show how practicing psychoanalysts and modernist writers worked in close proximity on the same terrain—narrating the minds of others, interpreting the meaning of texts, theorizing queer experience. Attuned to subtler forms of influence and reaction—and featuring an ensemble cast of secondary characters who practiced or wrote about Freudian psychoanalysis—Secret Sharers offers a revelatory account of the rise of modernist conceptions of literary autonomy.---Laura Heffernan, author of The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study

Jennifer Spitzer is associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in the Novel, Modern Language Quarterly, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, and other venues.