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 Two previously unpublished interviews, “‘An American in New York’: LeAnne Howe” (2019) and “Genre-Sliding on Stage with LeAnne Howe” (2020), explore unexamined areas of her personal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.

Book News: Future studies' relevance to literary studies

Futures

EDITED BY SANDRA KEMP AND JENNY ANDERSSON

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780198806820

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/futures-9780198806820?cc=us&lang=en&#

Futures examines the relevance of futures studies to literary studies. It demonstrates how the growing interest in futures thinking is opening up multidisciplinary conversations and initiatives, examining historical and contemporary forms of futures knowledge, the methodologies and technologies of futures expertise, and the role played by different institutions on legitimizing, deploying, and controling anticipatory practices.

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.

Bringing together emerging perspectives on the future from diverse disciplinary perspectives including critical theory, design, anthropology, sociology, politics, and history, this book places the provocation of power at the heart of the book through an investigation of futures as both objects of science and objects of the human imagination, creativity, and will. A multidisciplinary team of contributors challenge and debate the varied ways in which futures are conjured and constructed, exploring issues as diverse as the utopian imagination, history and philosophy, literary and political manifestos, artefacts and design fictions, and forms of technological and financial forecasting, big data, climate modelling, and scenarios.

The book positions the future as a question of power, of representations and counter-representations, and forms of struggle over future imaginaries. Forms of futures-making depend on complex processes of envisioning and embodiment. Each chapter investigates the critical vocabularies, genres, and representational methods -- narrative, quantitative, visual, and material -- of futures-making as deeply contested fields in cultural and social life.

Sandra Kemp is director, The Ruskin—Library, Museum and Research Centre at Lancaster University. She is professor in the history department at Lancaster University and visiting professor at Imperial College London. As an academic and curator, her futures-related work spans the exhibition and monograph Future Face: Image, Innovation, Identity (2004-6) at the London Science Museum and subsequent South Asian exhibition tour; The Future Is Our Business: The Visual History of Future Expertise project at the V&A (2013); and Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future at The Ruskin, Lancaster University in 2019. She is Principal Investigator for the AHRC/Labex-funded Universal Histories and Universal Museums project on the role of the museums in Europe in building knowledge about the future.

Jenny Andersson is professor of the History of Ideas and Science at Upsala University, Sweden.

Eliot's "things that cling": A Closer Look at JML 45.3

 

Take a closer look at JML 45.3. Author Rachel Murray shares how Eliot's gripping crustaceans help us understand attachment in his writing in THIS POST for the Indiana University Press blog

Her essay, “Things That Cling: Marine Attachment in Eliot” is now available for FREE on Project Muse.

JML 45.3 (Spring 2022) is LIVE!

JML 45.3 (Spring 2022) on the theme "New Materialisms" is now live on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48204

 

Content includes:

Jennifer Yusin

Editorial Changes

FREE!

Marit Grøtta

Showing Seeing: The Study of Faces and Portrait Photographs in Virginia Woolf’s Early Novels 

Rachel Murray

Things that Cling: Marine Attachments in Eliot 

FREE!

Emma Felin

Faith and Fabrication in To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf’s Table-Cloth(s)

Olga Zolotareva

The Image Responds: Photographic Aura in Aleksandr Ivanov’s “Stereoscope” 

Matt Prout

Art or Shit: Value, Sincerity, and the Avant-garde in David Foster Wallace 

Zackary Vernon

Faulkner’s Charismatic Megaflora: Critical Plant Studies and the US South

Quan Zhou and Qiping Liu

Agentic Things and Traumatized People in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Aaron McCullough

Sheaths, Molds, and Shards: The Formation of an Anthropological Aesthetics in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark

Alyson Brickey

“Fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth”: Object-Oriented Lists in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 

James Draney

W.G. Sebald’s Paper Universe: Austerlitz and the Poetics of Media Obsolescence 

Reviews

Zachary Kinsella

Becoming Bewildered

Tim Clarke

Modernist Women’s Writing and the Gift of Literature 

Karina Jakubowicz

From Waste Lands to Farmhands: T.S. Eliot and the Organic Husbandry Movement 

Jeffrey Careyva

The Evanescence of Lyric: A Review of John Wilkinson’s Lyric in Its Times: Temporalities in Verse, Breath, and Stone

 

Book News: How D.H. Lawrence established a writing career

D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings

BY ANNALISE GRICE

Edinburgh UP, 2021

ISBN: 9781474458009

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-d-h-lawrence-and-the-literary-marketplace.html

Despite the materialist turn in modernist studies, the extent and depth of D. H. Lawrence’s engagement with the literary marketplace has not been considered. The labelling of him as a working class ‘genius’ has concealed the question of how he became a published writer. Analyzing the literary marketplace of the long Edwardian period, this book assesses the circumstances for becoming an author at this time, examining Lawrence’s changing conceptions of what kind of writer he wanted to be and who he wanted to write for. It reconsiders the significance of Lawrence’s literary mentors Ford Madox Hueffer and Edward Garnett and recovers several figures (including Violet Hunt and Ezra Pound) whose significance for Lawrence’s career has been underestimated. The book evaluates how Lawrence’s work was marketed and received by the reading public in Britain and America, examining publishing houses (including Heinemann, Duckworth, T. Fisher Unwin and Mitchell Kennerley) and literary journals and magazines (such as the New Age, the English Review, Madame and Forum).

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.

"Grice provides a finely-tuned assessment of how Lawrence shaped his identity as a writer early on, through strategies and negotiations, and assistance from professional and social networks. For a comprehensive account of how Lawrence developed his talents and attained legitimacy in the literary marketplace, this book is key." – Judith Ruderman, Duke University

Annalise Grice is senior lecturer in English literature at Nottingham Trent University. She specializes in the work of D. H. Lawrence and the literary marketplace during the long twentieth century; her research interests extend to the professionalization of women’s writing, the Edwardian and early modernist sex novel, literary censorship, May Sinclair and Violet Hunt, Marie Stopes and literary representations of women's reproductive rights.