Book News: New view of Proust's magnum opus

The World According to Proust

BY JOSHUA LANDY

Oxford UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780197648681

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780197648681?cc=gb&lang=en&

100 years after Proust's death, In Search of Lost Time remains one of the greatest works in World Literature. At 3,000 pages, it can be intimidating to some. This short volume invites first-time readers and veterans alike to view the novel in a new way.

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.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He was the author of stories, essays, translations, and a 3,000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus in which Joshua Landy invites the reader to view the novel as a single quest--a quest for purpose, enchantment, identity, connection, and belonging--through the novel's fascinating treatments of memory, society, art, same-sex desire, knowledge, self-understanding, self-fashioning, and the unconscious mind.

Landy also shows why the questions Proust raises are important and exciting for all of us: how we can feel at home in the world; how we can find genuine connection with other human beings; how we can find enchantment in a world without God; how art can transform our lives; whether an artist's life can shed light on their work; what we can know about the world, other people, and ourselves; when not knowing is better than knowing; how sexual orientation affects questions of connection and identity; who we are, deep down; what memory tells us about our inner world; why it might be good to think of our life as a story; how we can feel like a single, unified person when we are torn apart by change and competing desires. Finally, Landy suggests why it's worthwhile to read the novel itself-how the long, difficult, but joyous experience of making it through 3,000 pages of prose can be transformative for our minds and souls.

Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature and co-hosts the nationally syndicated public radio program "Philosophy Talk." His books include Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How to Do Things With Fictions (Oxford, 2012), and (as coeditor) The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009).

Book News: Unique biography examines Faulkner's daily life

William Faulkner Day by Day

BY CARL ROLLYSON

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496835017

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/W/William-Faulkner-Day-by-Day

William Faulkner has been the topic of numerous biographies, papers, and international attention. Yet there are no collected resources providing a comprehensive scope of Faulkner’s life and work before now. William Faulkner Day by Day provides unique insight into the daily life of one of America’s favorite writers. Beyond biography, this book is an effort to recover the diurnal Faulkner, to write in the present tense about past events as if they are happening now. More importantly, this book is concerned with more than the writer’s life. Instead, it examines the whole man—the daily, mundane, profound, life changing, and everything in between.

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 from the 1825 birth of Faulkner’s great-grandfather to Faulkner’s death 137 years later to the day, author and biographer Carl Rollyson presents for the first time a complete portrait of Faulkner’s life untethered from any one biographical or critical narrative. Presented as a chronology of events without comment, this book is accompanied by an extensive list of principal personages and is supported by extensive archival research and interviews. Populated by the characters of Faulkner’s life—including family and friends both little known and internationally famous—this book is for Faulkner readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the man and his work.

"William Faulkner Day by Day is a welcome addition to Faulkner studies. It is an essential source for Faulkner specialists—and interesting reading for all Faulkner enthusiasts. Faulkner the man as well as the writer is presented in all the various phases of his life. The book is informative, revealing, and, in quite a few rewarding instances, surprising." - Robert W. Hamblin, editor of A William Faulkner Encyclopedia

"In short, this is a book that anyone interested in William Faulkner will enjoy immensely. It is full of the man’s insights, humor, and contradictions. Reading it is an opportunity to witness an entire life, laid out day by day, from the young man starting out, to the old man nearing the end of life." - Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including The Life of William Faulkner; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biography have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Criterion, and he writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.

Book News: The possibilities and perils of disappearing acts in queer fiction

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

BY BENJAMIN BATEMAN

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192896339

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/queer-disappearance-in-modern-and-contemporary-fiction-9780192896339

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction breaks with appearance-based models of queer performativity and argues for the experiential richness and political potentials of recessive tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first-century queer literary production. The study theorizes a "perish-performative" that allows for agency in practices of abeyance, and it discovers within queerness's ample archive of vanishing acts an environmental ethos antithetical to inflationary versions of the human. 

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.

Tying modernist classics by E.M. Forster and Willa Cather to Andrew Holleran's gay classic Dancer from the Dance, and then moving to the contemporary ecogothic of Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream and the trans decadence of Shola von Reinhold's Lote, the book refuses the common wisdom that queerness becomes louder and prouder over time, delineating instead a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity wherein queerness finds escape, respite, and varied opportunities for imaginative reverie. This precarious subjectivity, necessitated but not defined by oppression and obstacle, rewards and restores the queer self, and it also contests the logics of development, acquisition, and productivity that wreak havoc on the planet and entrench social disparities of race, class, and ability. Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction supplies multiple accounts of the collective and personal pleasures, possibilities, and perils to be found in pulling away, going missing, and taking a break.

• Places modernist classics in conversation with contemporary queer and environmental fiction
• Intertwines literary studies, queer theory, and the environmental humanities
• Advances critical alternatives to 'coming out' narratives
• Revises theories of gender and sexual performativity

Benjamin Bateman is senior lecturer in Post-1900 British Literature at The University of Edinburgh and author of The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (Oxford UP, 2017). He previously held a joint appointment in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University Los Angeles, where he also served as director of The Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities. 

Book News: A history of critical responses to LGBTQ literature

LGBTQ+ Literature in the West: From Ancient Times to the Twenty-First Century

BY ROBERT C. EVANS

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350371835

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/lgbtq-literature-in-the-west-9781350371835/

SAVE 20% THROUGH PUBLISHER WEBSITE

A survey, within one volume, of the history of critical responses to LGBTQ literature from the beginning to the present day, this book explores changes in attitudes, literature and criticism over a period of two and a half thousand years. For various reasons it focuses on literature of "the West," trying to give readers a clear sense, within a relatively short compass, not only of the development of "queer" literature (perhaps the most encompassing of all terms) but especially of critical responses to that literature, notably during the past century and particularly the past fifty years.

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.

All in all, this book offers a roadmap to much of the excellent scholarship concerning LGBTQ literature that has arisen in the last half-century – an era of unparalleled interest in the topic and an era that has moved the topic from the distant sidelines of literary study to a place ever closer to the center of things.

"LGBTQ+ Literature in the West is a valuable reference for students and specialists alike. Evans provides rich historical thumbnails that sketch and situate significance with critical trajectory: The reader gains immediate identification plus direction for greater competence and fluency." –Frederick Roden, University of Connecticut

"Robert C. Evans' coverage of generations of scholarship makes this an invaluable resource. It is a useful first stop for scholars of all levels who are researching canonical, Western, queer narratives and their authors." –Katie R. Peel, University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Robert C. Evans is I. B. Young Professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery. He is the author or editor of more than sixty books and of numerous essays.

BOOK NEWS: Japanese studies of Anaïs Nin

Critical Analysis of Anaïs Nin in Japan

EDITED BY PAUL HERRON

Sky Blue Press, 2023

ISBN: 979-8985524031

https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Analysis-Anais-Nin-Japan/dp/B0C2S3GF4Y

Since 1966 when Anaïs Nin visited Japan after the US publication of her Diary, Japanese scholars have been studying, analyzing and translating Nin's work. Little known abroad, Japanese Nin studies have been one of the most astute and consistent in the world. This English-language collection features works by Japanese scholars, writers and translators over the past several decades up to the present time and offers the reader a unique view of Anaïs Nin, the writer and the person. 

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.

These scholars, living in modern-day Japan, react to Nin in a way that crosses not only cultural lines, but literary ones as well. While certain of Nin’s readers in Japan welcome Nin’s liberated message and confessional diary-writing, they do so in spite of their own history of conformity, privacy, and their country’s literary history, which stands in stark contrast to that of America. In short, the critical response to Nin tells us just as much about the Japanese literary tradition as it does Nin’s writing and American literature in general.

Sixteen essays, with illustrations, make for an important addition to global Nin studies.

Book News: The biopoetics of Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje

Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje

BY LESLEY HIGGINS AND MARIE-CHRISTINE LEPS

Academic Studies Press, 2022

ISBN: 9781644699959

https://www.academicstudiespress.com/studiesincomplit/9781644699959

After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, this book focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. 

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.

Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war.

“Heterotopic World Fiction, an exposé of the migratoriness that lies at the heart of transnational literature, makes a substantial and necessary contribution to the broadening field of world literature. Intellectually agile and marvellously navigable, this book shifts its locations of inquiry from Toronto to Sri Lanka, from ships to tunnels, from metropolitan London in the twentieth century to rural France in the nineteenth century. Higgins and Leps draw upon a rich and diverse corpus of memoirs, polemical treatises, and fiction to demonstrate the persistence of biopolitical and biopoetical ethics in literature. Scholars working in the area of human rights, activism, and biopolitics will turn to Heterotopic World Fiction for its engagement with questions of risk, danger, and truth-telling in the face of oppression.” — Allan Hepburn, McGill University

Lesley Higgins, professor of English at York University, specializes in late Victorian and modernist studies. Author of The Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics, she has also edited three volumes of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s prose. Research interests include world literature, feminist studies of modernism, textual studies, and poetry.

Marie-Christine Leps, associate professor of English at York University, is founding coordinator of the Graduate Diploma in World Literature. Author of Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance, she specializes in literary and cultural theory, world literature, and discourse analysis. Her current project focuses on world fictions of friendship.

BOOK NEWS: The effects of financialized discourse on post-2008 Irish fiction

Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction

BY MARY M. MCGLYNN

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815637868

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/5168/broken-irelands/

While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity.

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.

Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.

"McGlynn identifies fascinating patterns in contemporary Irish fiction and persuasively connects these to the cultural logics of the time period.…This is a complex and challenging endeavor and McGlynn does it with a sophistication that is dizzyingly brilliant."—Claire Bracken, Union College

"Broken Irelands offers a carefully calibrated analysis of capital, class, and narrative form in the post-Celtic Tiger Irish novel. Deftly combining literary criticism, theories of neoliberalism, and studies of late capitalist modernity, McGlynn contends, convincingly, that it is at the level of formal brokenness, rhetorical technique, and syntactical and stylistic strangeness and distress that something like the politics of contemporary Irish fiction discloses itself. Written with brio, critical affection for its subject matter, and intelligent insight, Broken Irelands sets an impressively high bar for future reflection on these topics."—Joe Cleary, Yale University

Mary M. McGlynn is professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar for Irish Studies.