BOOK NEWS: Afro-diasporic fiction confronts the resurgence of biological racism

Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction: Race, Kinship, and the Passion for Ontology

BY NICOLE SIMEK

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781501377655

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/alchemies-of-blood-and-afrodiasporic-fiction-9781501377655/

Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction focuses on the resurgence of biological racism in 21st-century public discourse, the ontological and material turns in the academy that have occurred over the same time period, and how Afro-diasporic fiction has responded to both with alternative visions of bloodlines, kinship, and community.

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 thinking through conceptions of race, ethnicity, and materiality at work within both humanities research and popular culture, Nicole Simek asks how the figure of alchemy – that semi-scientific, semi-mystical search for gold and the elixir of long life – can help scholars address the epistemological and affective investments in blood, bloodlines, and genetics marking both academic and mainstream discourses. To answer this question, Simek examines neo-plantation and Afrofuturist narratives, Afropessimist interventions, museums and public memory projects, and direct-to-consumer genetic testing services in the French Caribbean and the United States. This comparative approach to cultural production helps pinpoint and better understand the intersections and divergences between scholarship trends and troubling features of a broader Zeitgeist.

"This is a refreshing and original reflection on racial theory and contemporary cultural production that speaks aptly to the tensions and anxieties of our times while demonstrating how literature and film can offer salutatory alternatives to ongoing racial injustice." --Jane Hiddleston, professor of literatures in French, Oxford University

"Nicole Simek's Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction offers a trenchant critique of cultural and political bloodlines in contemporary Black thought, In a bold series of case studies, from genealogical analysis to a wonderful juxtaposition of work by Whitehead and Condé, Simek provides fresh thinking on a passion for the real in Black writing. An impressive contribution." --Peter Hitchcock, professor of English, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

 

Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA. Her latest books include Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life (2016) and Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation (2008). She is also co-editor of Francophone Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020) and translator of Maryse Condé's The Belle Créole (2020).

BOOK NEWS: Interviews with leading scholar in African American literature

Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr.

EDITED BY JOHN ZHENG

UP of Mississippi, 2023

ISBN: 9781496845443

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Jerry-W.-Ward-Jr

Jerry W. Ward Jr. (b. 1943) has published nonfiction, literary criticism, encyclopedias, anthologies, and poetry. Ward is also a highly respected scholar with a specialty in African American literature and has been recognized internationally as one of the leading experts on Richard Wright. Ward was Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College, served as a member of both the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights, and cofounded the Richard Wright Circle and the Richard Wright Newsletter. He has won numerous awards, and in 2001 he was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent.

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.

Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr. aims to add an indispensable source to American literature and African American studies. It offers an account of Ward's intelligent and thoughtful responses to questions about literature, literary criticism, teaching, writing, civil rights, Black aesthetics, race, and culture. Throughout the fourteen interviews collected in this volume that range from 1995 to 2021, Ward demonstrates his responsibilities as a contemporary scholar, professor, writer, and social critic. His charming personality glimmers through these interviews, which, in a sense, are inner views that allow us to see into his mind, understand his heart, and appreciate his wit.

John Zheng is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University and author of A Way of Looking, which won the Gerald Cable Book Award. He is also editor of African American Haiku: Cultural Visions; The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku; Conversations with Dana Gioia; and Conversations with Sterling Plumpp and coeditor of Conversations with Gish Jen, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

The deeply rooted heritage of recycled poetics: A closer look at JML 47.1

Sam Walker explores Sterling Brown's and Harryette Mullen's poetic experiments with "recycling" in this post for the Indiana University Press blog: 

https://iupress.org/connect/blog/the-deeply-rooted-heritage-of-recycled-poetics-a-closer-look-at-jml-47-1/

His JML 47.1 essay is available for FREE, linked in the blog post.

NEW ISSUE: JML 47.1 "Inheritances and Intertexts" is now LIVE!

 Journal of Modern Literature issue 47.1 (Fall 2023), on the theme "Inheritances and Intertexts" is now live on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51953

Content includes:

Aakanksha J. Virkar

Max Klinger’s Beethoven (1902), Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and the Anti-fascist Poetics of T.S. Eliot’s Coriolan I “Triumphal March” (1931) 

Matthew Thompson

Mobilizing Great War Literature: Rereading the English Canon through Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters

Courtney Ferriter

Inheriting the Language of Stein: The Pragmatist Poetics of Harryette Mullen

Paula Vene Smith

Day Today: Circadian Rhythms and the Sense of Unending in Poetic Diaries by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen

Erin Yanota

E.E. Cummings’s Shakespeare and the Modernist Middlebrow Sonnet

Dan Sperrin

The Augustan Plath: “Gulliver” and Other Poems

Sam Walker

“[S]ongs of allusion”: Sterling Brown, Harryette Mullen, and the Roots of Poetic Recycling

FREE

Jason Ciaccio

Modernity’s Waking Dreams: Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, and the Illuminations of Twilight States

Brian Brennan

“Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus”: W.H. Auden and the Latin Poet Venantius Fortunatus

Reviews 

Catherine Enwright

David Jones’s Medieval Voices: A Review of Poet of the Medieval Modern by Francesca Brooks

Layne M. Farmen

Gazing into the Eclipse: A Review of The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

Yingjie M. Cheng

“Possible, Possible, Possible”: Katherine Mansfield Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Burt Kimmelman

The New American Poetry, Personism, and the Cold War

Daniel T. O’Hara

The Gospel According to Lazarus

Welcome new JML co-editor Michael Leong

Michael Leong has been promoted from advisory editor to co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Dr. Leong is Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College. He is the author of several books of poetry—most recently Words on Edge (2018)—and the monograph Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (U of Iowa P, 2020). His essays on poetry and poetics have appeared or are forthcoming in a wide range of journals including A Contracorriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America; ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, & the World; Contemporary Literature; Denver Quarterly; The Hopkins Review; Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures; Interim; Jacket2; Journal of Modern Literature; Modern Language Studies; Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics; and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. He has previously served on the editorial board of American Literature. He lives in Central Ohio.

Dr. Leong joins the team of co-editors that includes Robert Caserio, Penn State University; Caren Irr, Brandeis University; Janet Lyon, Penn State University; Daniel T. O'Hara, Temple University; Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania; Ramón E. Soto-Crespo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Robert T. Tally, Jr., Texas State University; and Jennifer Yusin, Drexel University. 

BOOK NEWS: Exploring existential thought in Proust's fiction

Love, Subjectivity, and Truth: Existential Themes in Proust

BY RICK ANTHONY FURTAK

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780197633724

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/love-subjectivity-and-truth-9780197633724?cc=us&lang=en&#

Love, Subjectivity, and Truth engages in a lively manner with the overlapping areas of philosophy and literature, philosophy of emotions, and existential thought. “Subjective truth,” a phrase used in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, is rich with existential connotations. It invokes Kierkegaard above all, but significantly Nietzsche as well, and other philosophers who thematize love, subjectivity, and truth. In Search of Lost Time is especially concerned about what we can know about others through love. Insofar as it conveys and analyzes experience, the novel is capable not only of exploring existential issues but also of doing something like phenomenology.

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 we know is shaped by our way of knowing, just as the properties of visible, colored objects are determined by the wavelengths of light our eyes can see. Nowhere does the subjective basis of our awareness appear so evident as it does when we view things through loving eyes. In Proust's novel we find skeptical views about love expressed again and again. However, we also note countercurrents, in which love is shown to provide a unique sort of insight. At those times, love seems to be a prerequisite of veridical apprehension. Love, Subjectivity, and Truth investigates this tension as it is played out in Proust's fiction.

"In this lucid and beautifully written book, Rick Anthony Furtak explores the infinite folds of the heart as it closes and opens to reality — the reality of the world, and the reality of the self. His inquiry into the truthfulness of love in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu crosses seamlessly between literature, philosophy, and psychology, illuminating the grounds of perception and value." — Yi-Ping Ong, associate professor of Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University

"A hundred years on, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu remains the leading candidate for The Great Philosophical Novel. Rick Furtak has written a great philosophical book to accompany that novel, a book that helps us navigate the complex, often contradictory statements of Proust's narrator and reveals the coherent philosophical sensibility that lies beneath. Furtak is the ideal guide to a potentially intimidating but profoundly rewarding and enriching literary work. Readers will find it both informative and inspiring, and will be inspired by it, I hope, to return to Proust's novel." —Troy Jollimore, author of Love's Vision and Earthly Delights: Poems

"Once in a rare while, a book comes along that makes you rethink everything you believed about Proust; Love, Subjectivity, and Truth is just such a book. It is original, persuasive, and as clear as it is erudite, and it has persuaded me to see matters of love and knowledge in an entirely new way. Elegantly written, and even moving at times, this is the best book on Proust I've read in many years." —Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust

Rick Anthony Furtak is associate professor of Philosophy at Colorado College. His work is focused on the moral psychology of the emotions, the relations between philosophy and literature, and the unique spirit of existential thought. He is past President of the Søren Kierkegaard Society. His translations from Rainer Maria Rilke and a book of his own poems are among his most recent publications.

BOOK NEWS: Using Animal Studies tools to approach liminal figures in fiction

Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts: Defamiliarizing Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Fiction

BY DAVID P. RONDO

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350356122

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/doing-animal-studies-with-androids-aliens-and-ghosts-9781350356122/

Exploring what can be learned when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.

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.

Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.

"A great leap forward in the literary-theoretical approach to animal studies. Recommended for students of theory and fantastika. Heartily recomment" —Anthony Lioi, The Julliard School

"Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts provides a brilliantly subtle and compelling discussion of how thinking about entities that aren't animals can change our conceptions of animals by reconfiguring understanding of the human." —John Miller, University of Sheffield

David P. Rando is a professor in the Department of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He is the author of Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce (Bloomsbury, 2022); Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology (Palgrave, 2017); and Modernist Fiction and News (Palgrave, 2011).