Showing papers in "Journal of Modern Literature in 2016"

Alison Bechdel and Crip-Feminist Autobiography

Abstract: Alison Bechdel’s recent graphic memoirs generate new strategies for negotiating feminist and queer literary theory’s troubled relationship to metaphors of disability. Presenting a set of continuities between Alison’s embodied experience of OCD and her adult drawing and writing techniques, Fun Home (2006) performs an intriguing revision of feminism’s “madwoman in the attic.” In this way, the memoir stages a contemporary crip innovation in feminist literary form. Are You My Mother? (2012) extends this intervention by aestheticizing depression and its complex relationship to chronicity and care. Replacing the fantasy of artistic self-sufficiency with a model of creative interdependence, Bechdel thus opens spaces for theorizing new forms of feminist and crip collaboration.

Playing the Game of Literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic Novel, and the Geeky "Canon" of White Masculinity

Abstract: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011) illustrates the anxieties and uncertainties of embodiment and identity in the digital age by constructing a pop culture “canon” of texts that all participants in video game culture must know. The texts in this canon are “taught” via a series of references and puzzles that the characters in the novel (as well as the reader) must solve. Being a “gamer” thus becomes synonymous with having proper knowledge of the canon. However, the construction of this canon privileges certain kinds of bodies and identities over others. The result is an image of gamer culture in which white maleness is the default assumption against which all participants are measured.

Pirating Pound: Drafts & Fragments in 1960s Mimeograph Culture

Abstract: Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII , the final volume of his Cantos , first appeared as a 1967 piracy, mimeographed and staple-bound by Ed Sanders’s Fuck You Press. The piracy elicited two authorized versions: a commercial edition by New Directions (1968) and a hand-printed Stone Wall Press edition (1968). While the story of the piracy is well known, Sanders’s version of the text has received scant attention from critics, who tend to dismiss it as illegitimate. However, each of these three versions offers its own way of imagining Drafts & Fragments in relation to the market and the canon. In particular, the bibliographic details of the piracy situate Pound in the 1960s mimeograph revolution, offering insight into the ways that the next generation of experimental poets reconfigured and responded to modernism—not only through poetics, but through the dynamics of print production.

"Copied without loss": Michael Field's Poetic Influence on the Work of W.B. Yeats with appendix: Yeats's unpublished draft review of Field's plays

Abstract: Aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, two poets who lived and wrote under the pseudonym of Michael Field, have consistently been overlooked as influences on their own principal literary inheritor: William Butler Yeats. He was a great admirer of their poetry in his youth and continued to show serious critical engagement with their work throughout his career. In spite of Yeats’s connection to with Bradley and Cooper’s work and lives, hitherto no extensive critical study has been conducted regarding this relationship. The similarities in language, form, rhythms, and imagery between Field’s and Yeats’s adaptations of the mythic figures Deirdre and Leda demonstrate the former’s influence on the latter’s poetic style and themes.

Going "wicked & away": Writing Dream Songs in the Age of Fellowships

Abstract: John Berryman’s poetry volume 77 Dream Songs (1964) depicts its own composition as a vocational act of protest against the circumstances that force poets to teach in universities to earn a living. In Berryman’s poems, this vocational crisis inspires a crisis of form; repetition, previously a central constituent of poetry, now evokes the specter of boring work-time. To realize one’s creative potential, Berryman insists throughout his Songs that a poet needs “whole time,” free from the nine-to-five grind. In this era of expanding higher education, whole time comes in the form of fellowships, as private foundations offer the time and money to save poets from the classroom. Indeed, Berryman’s second volume of Dream Songs regard their composition as a creative process enabled by a Guggenheim fellowship. However, this poetry also provides an ironic image of contemporary academic labor, where the dream of work as self-fulfillment parallels the nightmare of self-exploitation.

The Scandal of jewish rage in william styron's sophie's choice

Abstract: Scholars have suggested that William Styron’s Nathan in Sophie’s Choice is insane or depraved — a character whose motivations lack rationality at best and are unambiguously evil at worst. Elie Wiesel, the author of the famous Holocaust memoir Night, has been very critical of Styron’s novel. Ironically, by using the Yiddish version of Wiesel’s memoir Night, it is possible to demonstrate that Nathan’s behavior is more “logical” than scholars have previously understood. This approach offers us a new way of reading and interpreting Styron’s novel by clarifying how Nathan’s character functions within a well-established tradition of sociopolitical outrage about racial oppression, which is best exemplified in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a text that Styron strategically references in Sophie’s Choice.

Sweet Child O' Mine: Una Marson's Cute Black Girls

Abstract: Jamaican poet, playwright, and political activist Una Marson consistently returns to images of black Jamaican girls throughout her 1930s poetry. Instead of being conditioned by gender and race as edible commodities, Marson describes her black girls as “sweet” to conjure and exorcise the imposition of England’s literary history upon colonial subjects, especially through allusions to William Wordsworth and his sweet girls, as well as the colonial history of Jamaica’s sugar cane exploitation. Reading Marson’s representations of sweet black girls in conjunction with Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic category of the “cute” paves a new avenue of inquiry into Marson’s poetry illuminating how she transforms the colonial commodity into a Jamaican girl whose future is not predetermined. Understanding Marson’s aesthetic experiments compels scholars not only to reassess Marson’s romantic influences, but also returns aesthetics to transnational modernist studies without consuming colonial specificity in the process.

Explanation in Composition: Gertrude Stein and the Contingency of Inductive Reasoning

Abstract: Gertrude Stein’s experimental and more widely-read poetry, fiction, and lectures participate in a philosophical conversation about explanation. Her novel Q.E.D ., her poem “An Elucidation,” and her lecture “Composition as Explanation,” show how Stein theorizes the possibility and the problems of explaining based on inductive reasoning. Stein endorses inductive reasoning, using facts alone, as the basis of an explanation, although she is also aware that eschewing deductive reference to laws or theories means that any resulting explanations are necessarily more subjective and therefore more contingent. Understanding Stein’s philosophical ambitions allows readers to clarify, although not solve, her notorious difficulty; Stein’s work is difficult because she is writing about a difficult philosophical problem: when and how subjective experience may justify an explanation.

The Day and the Life: Gender and the Quotidian in Long Poems by Bernadette Mayer and Lyn Hejinian

Abstract: Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day both articulate a domestic quotidian devoted to what Rita Felski in Doing Time calls “the repetitive tasks of social reproduction.” Mindful of the over-determined relationship between gender and the everyday, Hejinian and Mayer use the long poem to convey the elusive quotidian while engaging with its gendered associations. The exhaustive inclusions of Mayer’s “day” and the unexpected selections and juxtapositions of Hejinian’s “life” both use metonymy to represent a subversive poetics of the detail. Specifically, Hejinian reverses background and foreground, repeats phrases with shifting emphasis as analogue for the habits of everyday life, and defamiliarizes metonymic selection to render it visible. Mayer, in contrast, tests the long poem’s capacity for radical inclusiveness and traces metonymic connections between daily routines and larger social issues. Ultimately, My Life and Midwinter Day both assert the co-existence and indeed the interconnectedness of intellectual inquiry and the domestic work of cooking, cleaning, and care.

The Vibrating Wire: Nicholson Baker's Vox and the Art of Analog

Abstract: There is a lack of critical understanding of Nicholson Baker’s “phone sex novel” Vox (1992). Chiefly overlooked is the exact function of Vox ’s complex system of outmoded telecommunications technology, which the novelist uses in order to experiment with erotic possibilities of the human voice. Viewed historically, Baker’s embrace of analog technology occurs out of sync with the concurrent development of the ARPAnet into the public Internet. His strategic disruption of the Internet’s potential for communication foregrounds personal voice as a more intimate mode of sexual mediation than sterile and deterministic digital models. Understanding the full nature of Baker’s analog-directed perspective is essential for unpacking Baker’s recurring interest in idiosyncratic sexuality.

Mindless Pleasures: Playlists, Unemployment, and Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Abstract: If we are to judge by the amount of critical work devoted to it, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is his least interesting work. But the lack of critical consideration has less to do with the quality of the novel, than with the challenge it puts to readers of contemporary fiction. Throughout Inherent Vice, Pynchon attempts to alter how we approach the task of reading maximalist novels in the age of the Internet. Pynchon’s citation of his own references, gaming with ontological clarity, and celebration of cloudy intellectual powers, are strategies he employs in Inherent Vice to reevaluate what novels can offer us in the twenty-first century.

Publish and Perish: Freud's Claim to Literary Fame

Abstract: What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphere? Examining this question in the case of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams , read here as an autobiographical text, this paper explores the intricate nexus of ambition, death and writing. Freud is possessed by the possibility of becoming famous, a public persona, immortal. His route to achieving this is the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams . He aspires to greatness, and yet the very project that is supposed to secure it is fragile and insecure; the very project entails a risk. The same text that could secure one’s immortality becomes the locus of one’s absence. Publishing renders the most intimate text public and at a distance from oneself. The wish for glory cannot be assuaged through a published text, which is a public affair. One cannot make a name for oneself.

Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee's Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus

Abstract: J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus , makes use of postmodern pastiche: various literary themes are recycled as if on display in a “ literary theme park.” Coetzee also reuses themes he has explored in his previous works. Here a link can be made to Edward Said’s idea of late style, which includes an element of self-quotation. However, two issues are so important that Coetzee probes them further rather than recycles them. One is a conception of family based not on blood relations, but love. This is part of the other, more fundamental issue: the contingency of the world. By engaging with these subjects, The Childhood of Jesus embodies late style in Coetzee’s own sense of the term.

"But — what can anyone do about it?": Modernism, Superheroes, and the Unfinished Business of the Common Good

Abstract: Modernism’s frequently discussed antipathy towards mass culture might be seen as continuous with its distrust of the welfare state, insofar as both mass culture and the welfare state figure versions of collective modern agency at odds with modernism’s typically conservative, individualistic response to modernity. Seen from this perspective, modernism lies on a historical trajectory both with postmodernism’s putatively more open approach to mass culture and with neoliberalism’s now triumphantly mainstream celebration of individualism and critique of institutions. While we can identify other versions of modernism in authors like James Joyce and John Dos Passos, we might also look to the far less prestigious medium of the comic book, and in particular the superhero genre, to begin to map an alternative vision of aesthetic engagement with modernity — one that wrestles with the contradictions of but remains nonetheless committed to collective actions on behalf of the common good.

From Locus Classicus to Locus Lumpen: Junot Díaz’s “Aurora”

Abstract: Research funds for this article were provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through the research project “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach” (ref. FFI 2012–31250), directed by Prof. Jesus Benito Sanchez, and by the Regional Government of Castilla y Leon through the research Project “The Frontiers of Hospitality in Spanish and American Cultural Studies,” ref. SA342U14.

Digital Modernism as Method: Recent Publications in Digital Humanities

Abstract: This review essay explores three recent publications in the digital humanities that are relevant for scholars of modern literature. Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism fruitfully opens new modes of comparison between modern literature and electronic literature, though it depends on an outdated definition of modernism. Jerome McGann’s A New Republic of Letters exhorts all literature scholars to renew the traditions of philology in order to represent the history of literature in the digital realm — a salutary, but inconsistently argued, lesson. Comparative Textual Media, a collection edited by Pressman and N. Katherine Hayles, which provides an exciting array of close readings and cultural histories of textuality, is strongly recommended. Taken together, these three books reveal the emergence of a new methodological modernism in the digital humanities.

Translating in the Margins: Attending to Glossaries in Latina/o Literature

Abstract: While literary scholars have frequently and fruitfully explored the politics of linguistic identity as they play out in the lives of Latina/o authors, their books, and their characters, the paratextual glossary has often been overlooked as simply a tool meant to accommodate monolingual, English-speaking audiences. But in a number of contemporary Latina/o narratives, including most particularly Ernesto Galarza’s 1971 autobiographical novel Barrio Boy , those glossaries both offer and undermine the illusion of linguistic stability, materially engaging readers in the process of transculturation. Rather than easing translation for monolingual readers, these glossaries force readers to reflect on the process and politics of translation itself.

Introduction: Comics and Modernism

Abstract: Comics and modernism, it could be said, served to coproduce each other. Phillip Wegner notes that like its kin-form, film, mass-circulated newspaper comic strips “emerge in the late-nineteenth-century context of a nascent cultural modernism” (para. 4). Many modernist artists and critics, moreover, relied on these newer forms and technologies as a defining point of contrast, taking them as the detritus of a degraded commercial culture in opposition to modernist experimentation and expression. Irving Howe, defender of modernist ideals into the postwar period, characteristically argues in his 1948 essay “Notes on Mass Culture” that comic strips and Hollywood cinema alike “suppress the free play of the unconscious” (47): “comic characterization consists of persistent identification of each name with an outstanding personality trait” and that “[l]ike comic strips, though seldom so simply, movie stars also tend to become identified in the mass mind with one personality strand” (48). For Howe and many of modernism’s leading exponents, comics — not only newspaper strips but also the comic books arriving on American newsstands in the mid-1930s — function as modernism’s wretched Other. Not all modernists took such a dim view of comics, of course. In the US, litterateurs and cultural critics including Gilbert Seldes, Dorothy Parker, and e.e. cummings praised comics and cartoons as examples of a vibrant American folk culture or, to use Seldes’s formulation, the vernacular “lively arts.” Nevertheless, the view of comics as emblematic of a disreputable consumer culture prevailed, even as film acquired cultural legitimacy, thanks largely to the dominance of the fundamentally modernist auteur theory found in influential midcentury film journals such as Cahiers du cinema. And yet Michael Wood, in an essay on modernism and film, points out that despite the temptation “to argue that all films are Modernist, that the cinema itself is an accelerated image of modernity,” the medium has demonstrated a “yearning to become the twentieth century’s version of the nineteenth century’s novel” by consistently

Contesting the Unconscious: Frederic W. Myers and Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Abstract: As he prepared to write his autobiography, Vladimir Nabokov turned to the work of Victorian investigator of the paranormal, Frederic W. Myers. Myers’s concept of layered selfhood illuminates otherwise obscure connections between Nabokov’s treatment of immortality, family relationships, human evolution and sensory perception. Reading Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited in dialogue with Myers’s ideas points to a close engagement by Nabokov with the debates on the self in time that occurred on the cusp of the twentieth century. It brings to light the subtleties of the autobiography’s critique of Freud and nuances views of the text’s temporal structures as Bergsonian. The new view of Nabokov and Myers that emerges from reading the Nabokov archive suggests the possibility of fruitful interactions between genetic criticism and the history of ideas.

How Not to Re-read Novels: The Critical Value of First Reading

Abstract: The temporal dimension of reading became, in the early twentieth century, a source of critical anxiety about the novel’s status as high art. As a result, most critical approaches have since implicitly examined novels’ forms from the perspective of a reader who has read the whole work. Reimagining close reading as attentive instead to the constraints and investments of the first-time reader compels us to rethink both the purposes of modernist formal innovation and the ideal of “critical distance” more broadly. The valorization — today and in the modernist period — of a detached, spatial analyses of fiction neglects the ways in which novelists — even difficult modernists — develop styles designed to keep first-time readers in the flow of the temporal experience of reading. A form of close reading permits a model of critical reading that seeks to recapture, rather than to erase, the experience of first reading.

Saturn vs. Hermes: The Battle of the Hemispheres in Ian McEwan's Saturday

Abstract: Ian McEwan’s Saturday explores the tension between fundamental human polarities, polarities the novel shares with many improvisations (texts that claim unmediated, spontaneous, careless, or inspired creation): immediacy vs. mediation; freedom vs. necessity; spontaneity vs. care and craft; Hermes vs. Saturn; right- vs. left-brain. McEwan’s protagonist is both improviser and, as neurosurgeon, careful craftsman. His day provides him opportunities to confront and resolve these dualities. The novel exhibits improvisation’s formal conventions and thematic features, demonstrating their synergy. Seen through the lens of improvisation, the novel dramatizes the right-brain’s pushback in the life of a man almost wholly dedicated to the rationalistic, analytic left-brain.

Lynd Ward's Modernist "Novels in Woodcuts": Graphic Narratives Lost Between Art History and Literature

Abstract: Lynd Ward’s “novels in woodcuts” — long-form narratives Ward pioneered in America between 1929 and 1937 and composed entirely in the medium of sequential wood engravings — have been widely neglected in both art historical and literary critical scholarship despite engaging crucial questions in American modernism and anticipating the contemporary rise of graphic narrative. Ward’s oeuvre here is viewed through his sustained ambivalence toward the commercialization of the arts, both in his texts and his work as a publisher. His critical erasure is as much a function of modernist scholarship’s continued irresolution toward the relationship between high art and popular culture as it is of the singularly hybrid status of his texts. Seen through the lens of comics studies, author/artists like Ward reside in a place at the intersection of literature and the fine arts, allowing us to reimagine many of the critical commonplaces of modernist scholarship.

The Failure of the Parental Metaphor: A Lacanian Reading of James Joyce's "Eveline"

Abstract: The work of Jacques Lacan enables us to understand why, in James Joyce’s short story “Eveline,” the young woman refuses to board the ship to elope with her lover; the short story, in turn, enables us to better understand the Lacanian paternal metaphor and its function. This second aim is particularly pertinent in the case of Lacanian theory, reputedly opaque and, with the inclusion of algebraic like formulae, appearing divorced from actual human beings and their emotions. Examining Lacan’s concept in conjunction with a close reading of the story, two phrases, the father’s and the mother’s, can be seen as depicting the failure of the paternal metaphor. This in turn accounts for the last-minute refusal to embark, thereby resolving the enigma posed by the story and also connecting a Lacanian formula with an emotion: the anguish in the final scene being the consequence of the deficit of the metaphor.

They Must Be Re(pre)sented: Archiving Nuyorican Poetry's "Diasporous" Bodies

Abstract: Urayoan Noel’s In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam offers a literary history of Nuyorican poetics from the cultural ferment of the movement era to contemporary poets working in slam, hip-hop, and lyric traditions. Exploring how poets negotiate the tension between invisibility and abjected visibility that defines the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, Noel presents Nuyorican poetry as a collection of “out-of-focus” modes that challenge representational and documentary forms. The book examines how poems and performances by foundational poets such as Victor Hernandez Cruz and Pedro Pietri and contemporary poets such as Edwin Torres and Aracelis Girmay employ an aesthetic defined by humor, play, irresolution, irony, paradox, masks, personae, noise, and the absurd and surreal. In placing Nuyorican poetry under the “blurred” lens of diaspora, In Visible Movement effectively argues for a capacious, innovative tradition grounded in the embodied performance of identity in print and on stage. This approach facilitates Noel’s reading of Nuyorican poetry in relation to the New American Poetries and in the dual lineage of William Carlos Williams’s vernacular modernism and Jorge Brandon’s street poetry that influenced the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

On Not "Not Knowing French": T.S. Eliot's Poetry En Français

Abstract: In 1917, while suffering from writer’s block following the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations , T.S. Eliot composed six poems in French as a creative experiment. Although four of the poems were subsequently published and remained in print thereafter at the poet’s direction, they have received relatively little critical attention and are typically dismissed as a picturesque detour en route to the annus mirabilis of The Waste Land . But Eliot’s French suite gave voice to new sonorities and tonal registers that would “translate” not only to The Waste Land but also to Four Quartets , while also, curiously, strengthening his ties to the metaphysical poets of the English canon.

How Disgust Works: Truman Capote's "La Côte Basque"

Abstract: Many Truman Capote critics consider his short story “La Cote Basque” to be the beginning of his artistic decline, a consideration anchored in the presumption that the story is disgusting. Drawing upon theories of affect and narrative, I argue that disgust is transitive, and offer a reinterpretation of the story as one about how disgust works, in both narrative and discourse, to critique the elite with whom Capote was associated. Considering the transitivity of disgust also facilitates a reexamination of critical responses to the story as a redirection of disgust away from the elites Capote critiqued onto the author himself. This reassessment demonstrates how disgust works as a key component of the riseand-fall narrative of Capote’s career that critics continue to perpetuate. Examining how disgust works in “La Cote Basque” and its reception therefore encourages a reassessment of the story, its author, and the construction of his critical legacy.

Modernism and Antimodernism at Harvard: James Laughlin's Early Poetry

Abstract: James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions Books, was also a poet whose artistic evolution ran almost precisely counter to that of the modernism he did so much to promote. Originally a juvenile imitator of Pound and Eliot, Laughlin abruptly rejected their model while studying under adamant anti-modernists at Harvard, and developed a style much closer to that of Williams or even Catullus. Ironically, even as he swerved away from their influence, Laughlin’s teachers still could only see in his poetry the taint of the high modernists. At the same time, Laughlin had begun working with and publishing the writing of nascent “Middle Generation” poets such as John Berryman and Randall Jarrell. Reading Laughlin’s work in the context of the 1950s modernist vs. anti-modernist struggle shows that Laughlin should be considered a part of the Middle Generation, rather than a belated modernist imitator and impresario.

"Forever Just Occurring": Postwar Belatedness in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz

Abstract: Critics frequently read W.G. Sebald’s work, and particularly his final novel Austerlitz (2001), through the critical framework of trauma and mourning. Such readings tend to focus on Austerlitz’s inability to retrieve childhood memories that would connect him not only to his own past but also to a collective memory of Jewish trauma. However, rather than representing such temporal divides as a lamentable lack of access to this past, Sebald resignifies them in ways that enable an innovative articulation of the past’s continued relevance in the present. Releasing physical artifacts and architectural spaces from the burden of memorialization, Sebald allows them to function as objects whose materiality inaugurates an affective encounter with the past. Taking seriously the affective engagement with such objects that attest to the past without overdetermining it, these new materialist methodologies enable us to move past static models of historical memory and politicized forgetting.