Journal of Modern Literature 

About: Journal of Modern Literature is an academic journal published by Indiana University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Poetry & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 0022-281X. Over the lifetime, 976 publications have been published receiving 4624 citations. The journal is also known as: JML.

Flights of Memory : Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism

Abstract: While Teju Cole's 2011 novel Open City has been received as an exemplary cosmopolitan performance, a careful reading of the novel's engagement with memories of suffering and of its evocations of ae ...

“Maps of the World in Its Becoming”: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy'sThe Road

Abstract: In The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy’s approach to “naming differently” establishes the imaginative conditions for a New Earth, a New Eden. The novel diverges from the rest of McCarthy’s oeuvre, a change especially evident when the book is set against Blood Meridian because their styles and concomitant worldviews differ so strikingly. The style of The Road is pared down, elemental: it triumphs over the dead and ghostly echoes of the abyss and, alternately, over relentless ironic gesturing. And it is precisely in The Road’s language that we discover the seeds of the work’s unexpectedly optimistic worldview. The novel is best understood as a linguistic journey toward redemption, a search for meaning and pattern in a seemingly meaningless world — a search that, astonishingly, succeeds. Further, I posit The Road as an argument for a new kind of fiction, one that survives after the current paradigm of excess collapses, one that returns to the essential elements of narrative.

Briony's Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan'sAtonement

Abstract: X or a long time Ian McEwan found himself trapped in the role of a sensational writer caricatured by the British press as Ian Macabre and the Clapham Shocker. The stories he wrote at the beginning of his writing career ? First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets, and Other Stories (1978) ? as well as his first two novels ? The Cement Garden (1979) and The Comfort ofStrangers (1981) ? described in clinical detail the sexual and social aberrations of adolescent mentalities whose voices then offered him "a certain kind of rhetorical freedom."1 It is extraordinary to consider the distance McEwan has traveled in the intervening quarter century. Atonement (2001) employs the narrative voice of a 77-year-old English woman and focuses on a crucial period of British history between 1935 and 1940. Instead ofthe closed claustrophobic inner world of his early protagonists, Atonement ranges from an upper-class household in pre-War southern England, to the retreat of the British army to Dunkirk, to a wartime London hospital, ending with a coda in 1999. McEwan first effected his escape from an exclusively subjective narrative perspective in his third novel, The Child in Time (1987), in which the lost child ofthe title represents an outer as well as inner world. This novel came after a gap of six years during which McEwan had turned to drama as his principal outlet. In particular, The Imitation Game (1981), a play for television, Or Shall We Die? (1983), an oratorio, and The Ploughmans Lunch (1983), a film, reveal his awakened interest in the world of politics and social action, in the nuclear threat, environmental pollution, and the oppression of women. As he confessed to John Haffenden in 1983, "England under Mrs. Thatcher leaves me with a nasty taste."2 Since he returned to fiction in 1987, every subsequent novel has had not just a private and psychological component, but a public and historical one as well: the govern? ment commission on which Stephen sits in The Child in Time (1987), the Cold War in The Innocent (1990), the ongoing influence of racism and fascism in Black Dogs (1992), the short-sightedness

J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the Task of the Imagination

Abstract: In an early review of Disgrace, Jane Taylor first relates this novels treatment of violence in post-apartheid South Africa to the European Enlightenment's legacy ofthe autonomy ofthe human subject (25), in terms of which each individual is conceived of as a living consciousness separated totally from every other consciousness, and then discusses J.M. Coetzee's postulation of the sympathetic imagination as a potential corrective to the violence attendant on monadic individuality Taylor makes the telling point that, in the eighteenth century, the notions of sensibility, sympathy, and compassion, which the novel repeatedly invokes, were self-consciously developed as an ethical response to the instrumentalist logic of autonomous individuality and, in this regard, she cites Adam Smith's observation in The Theory ofMoral Sentiments that "By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensation" (qtd. in Taylor 25). Relatively few ofthe many subsequent readings of Disgrace have elaborated on Taylor's necessarily cursory examination of the role of the imagination in Disgrace. For the most part, this aspect of the novel seems to be regarded as a self-evident given and therefore not in need of elaboration. When critical discussions ofthe text do touch on the imagination, they tend automatically to assume that Coetzee deems this faculty capable of countering the individual's solipsistic concern with itself. By extension, they assume that the Bildung which Coetzee's protagonist, David Lurie, undergoes in the course of Disgrace involves the successful development of a sympathetic imagination and hence the capacity to empathize with the other.1

Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel'sFun Home

Abstract: When Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic came out in 2006, the striking literary quality of the narrative was noted from her first reviews. Bechdel’s memoir is positioned at the intersection of image, narrative, autobiography and history. But Bechdel makes an additional play for high literary status by larding her book with the influence of canonical modernist literature, not only through frequent and explicit citation and reference, but also by subtler formal, thematic and textual gestures. Of all of these references, Joyce is the most ubiquitous; Joyce frames the novel and introduces both the conflict presented and its reconciliation. Bechdel clearly states the legitimacy of the graphic narrative as inheritor of the modernist tradition, particularly as exemplified through Joyce. At the same time, her relationship to Joyce and the modernist tradition is playful and sometimes combative.