Showing papers in "Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America in 2018"

Broadcasting Nature Poetry: Una Marson and the BBC's Overseas Service

Abstract: Although the nature poems of the Jamaican writer Una Marson are usually set against her transnational projects, they are inextricable from the cosmopolitan vision described in her radio broadcasts and journalism Studies of transnational modernism have brought to the fore Marson's participation in pan- Africanist political and literary networks, her poems' mediation of the black West Indian woman's experience, and her work promoting West Indian literature in the metropolitan institution of the BBC Analyses of Marson as a transnational igure, however, have obscured aspects of her literary production—speciically, her nature poetry Placing Marson's West Indian nature poetry that was broadcast by the BBC in the context of the original programs reveals the efects of moving from print publication to radio broadcast And, along with her editorials for the Jamaican literary magazine The Cosmopolitan (1928–31), Marson's BBC broadcasts (1939–45) make the case for the ongoing relevance of the pastoral tradition to public life

The Self-Help Hermeneutic: Its Global History and Literary Future

Abstract: The self-improvement industry has been analyzed from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including those of sociology, history, and religion, but its relation to literature has not received the attention it demands. Self-help is inextricable from the history and future of reading around the globe. Using Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859) as a case study, I unearth the overlooked role of the self-help hermeneutic, a practical reading method that collapses period, nation, and genre in the global dissemination of literary culture. I then demonstrate that the pastiche didacticism of Smiles's early readers has become a mainstream conceit of twenty-first-century novels, including Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire, and Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?. By putting on hold the standard critique of the genre's homogeneous neoliberal influence, I recalibrate the scales by which we measure self-help's literary and political relevance.

Editor’s Column—Historicism, Presentism, Futurism

Abstract: convention caught my attention right away. I looked up the panelists: a graduate student (Abigail Droge), three junior faculty members (Cynthia Nazarian, Ragini haroor Srinivasan, and Jefrey Wilson), and the veterans Michael Clune, Anna Kornbluh, and Caroline Levine, who presided. Eightthirty Saturday morning wasn’t my favorite time, but I wasn’t going to miss this particular forum on this particular subject. Presentism has long been a bête noire in the academy—condemned openly by historians (above all, Lynn Hunt, in her 2002 presidential address to the American Historical Association), and more quietly but no less ref lexively by literary scholars. Morally complacent and methodologically suspect, presentism names a fallacy that deforms the past in our own image. To be a “presentist” is to allow the concerns of the moment to color all our perceptions. It is to be blithely unaware of historical speciicities, to project our values onto past periods without any regard for the diferent norms then operative. Such narcissism erases the historicity of texts, their conditions of production and reception, ofering instead “records of our present needs and anxieties” (Kastan 17). Here is a term of opprobrium to claim at one’s peril. he MLA panel seemed to have done so on full alert. “Strategic Presentism”— a rif on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s celebrated coinage “strategic essentialism”—recalls her argument that problematic concepts could work for the marginalized within situational limits. Just as in the 1980s a cautiously adopted essentialism allowed minority groups to bracket the nontrivial diferences among themselves and act as a purposeful entity under adverse conditions, so too in 2018 a cautiously adopted presentism might allow humanists to bracket the nontrivial diferences 1 3 3 . 2 ]

Technique and the Time of Reading

Abstract: What time is it when we read? There are many answers to this question. Time might refer to a particular day of the week, as in Sunday reading, a practice that Christina Lupton finds has spanned both religious and secular contexts. Or time might imply a sense of pace, that reading is something we do quickly or slowly, which Rolf Engelsing suggests when he distinguishes between intensive and extensive reading. Or perhaps time is more periodic, an argument one finds in Deidre Lynch's work on nineteenth-century habitual reading or Christopher Cannon's work on medieval practices of rereading. Or time could be closer to an idea or topos, as in Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope like idyllic time. Finally, for someone like Gerard Genette the time of reading is fundamentally about anachronism, the nonlinear nature of narrative time.

Secrecy and the Hermeneutic Potential in Beowulf

Abstract: Beowulf confronts the limits of knowledge in various forms: the unknowability of death, the secretive behavior of the poem's monsters, the epistemological distance of the past, and our inevitably fragmentary understanding of the poem itself. In the process, the poem also tells us something important about the methods and possibilities that it imagines for the work of discovery and literary interpretation more broadly. Scholars commonly address the poem as a text whose secrets need uncovering, but the poem's engagement with the mechanics of secrecy can be a cue for thinking through our own methods as literary critics in encounters with texts of the past. If we take Beowulf's treatment of secrecy as a guide for the poem's hermeneutic potential, then we find that the poem invites a kind of reading that rigorously, yet humbly, acknowledges how little we can actually know.

The Classroom in the Canon: T. S. Eliot’s Modern English Literature Extension Course for Working People and The Sacred Wood

Abstract: Literary critics have long imagined that T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood (1920) shaped the canon and methods of countless twentieth-century classrooms. This essay turns instead to the classroom that made The Sacred Wood: the Modern English Literature extension school tutorial that Eliot taught to working-class adults between 1916 and 1919. Contextualizing Eliot's tutorial within the extension school movement shows how the ethos and practices of the Workers' Educational Association shaped his teaching. Over the course of three years, Eliot and his students reimagined canonical literature as writing by working poets for working people—a model of literary history that fully informed his canon reformation in The Sacred Wood. This example demonstrates how attention to teaching changes the history of English literary study. It further reveals how all kinds of institutions, not just elite universities, have shaped the discipline's methods and canons.

Spenser at Play

Abstract: Reading The Faerie Queene is like playing. his article develops an account of three relevant tendencies of play—to change through time, to animate its object, and to remain opaque in meaning—and distinguishes this account from other critical understandings of play. It then introduces a historical analogue to Spenser's playfulness—the giving of formerly holy objects to children as toys during the Reformation—and uses it as a lens through which to read the ending of the first book of Spenser's poem, where the vast dragon not only becomes a posthumous plaything but also displays surprisingly playful propensities of its own. Readers respond both to this moment and to their own responses to it, playing in the presence of the poem's opaquely foregrounded meanings.

Human and Machine Cultures of Reading: A Cognitive-Assemblage Approach

Abstract: The concept “cultures of reading” should be expanded to include machines that read. Machine reading is exemplified by the computer system called Never-Ending Language Learning (NELL). Because NELL lacks real-world experience, its semantic comprehension is limited to forming categories of words. This process illustrates a major difference between human and machine reading: whereas human reading involves causal reasoning, machine reading relies more on correlations. Human-machine hybrid reading, for example the kind done with an e-book, can be understood as a cognitive assemblage through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. The introduction of mechanical cognition into printing can be seen in the Paige Compositor, from 1878. The transition from electromechanical cognition to more flexible digital and electronic computational media marks the movement from print, understood as a technology involving the arrangement of type pieces to impress ink on paper, to postprint, in which inked products originate as computer files. This change, which signals an ontological rupture in writing and reading practices, is addressed through a cognitive-assemblage approach emphasizing the distribution of cognition among technical and human actors.

The Way We Review Now

Abstract: The rebecca tuvel controversy may not seem like an example of the way we write now. my purpose in this essay is to convince you that it is.

Filling in Blanks: Nella Larsen's Application to Library School

Abstract: In 1922 Nella Larsen Imes was the first African American applicant accepted to the library school of the New York Public Library; soon she would be a promising novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen's library school application is a rich text that discloses the encounter of a conflicted subject with the norms and values of an institution. Bureaucratic forms do not have readers—at least as literature professors generally use that word—but filling out an application requires cultural competence, and evaluating one requires interpretive activity. Responding to a standard question on the application, Larsen compiled a book list that reflects her pragmatic, aesthetic, and emotional investment in reading. Stylistically and thematically, this ephemeral document anticipates Larsen's best work; it intimates conflicting perspectives on race, gender, and national belonging while exposing the limits of “imagined community” in one culturally typical American institution.

Indigested in the Scenes: Hamlet’s Dramatic Theory and Ours

Abstract: Discussions of the relation between drama and performance have been dominated by two symmetrical, emancipatory impulses. Performance scholars have, for the past half-century, sought to liberate performance from the authority of the drama. Literary scholars have, for centuries, if not millennia, sought to distinguish a “literary” dimension of the dramatic text free of the flux of performance. his essay diagnoses in Shakespeare's Hamlet an alternative story about the relation between drama and performance. Paying refreshed attention to the earlier and less famous of Hamlet's statements of dramatic theory—his blurb for the “excellent play” featuring Aeneas's speech to Dido—I find Hamlet bringing drama, especially in its “literary” dimension, crashing back into performance. his collision does not reinstitute the authority of the text; rather, it radically democratizes the scene of dramatic performance by “indigesting” the behaviors of the participants therein.

Winthrop’s Journal in Manuscript and Print: The Temporalities of Early-Nineteenth-Century Transmedial Reproduction

Abstract: In the early nineteenth century, the antiquarian James Savage produced a print edition of John Winthrop's seventeenth-century manuscript journal. This transmedial reproduction illustrates the differing affordances of print and manuscript as vehicles for connecting to the past. Manuscripts offer a tangible link to long-dead people, but manuscripts' rarity encourages their sequestration in archives. In contrast, print editions make historical content more broadly accessible but provide a less direct material link to earlier eras. Print facsimiles of manuscript, such as the reproduction of Winthrop's handwriting included in Savage's edition, seek to embody the best of both media. But print facsimiles' promise of access to manuscript materiality elides their nature as temporal hybrids and their tendency to distort and damage their originals. The way that nineteenth-century antiquarians negotiated manuscript's and print's temporal affordances and juggled the competing prerogatives of past, present, and future makes those antiquarians useful models for understanding the stakes of digitization projects today.

Beyond Contempt: Ways to Read Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Abstract: I wrote my dissertation in the late 1990s. it compared harriet beecher stowe and other antebellum sentimental women writers with professional male orators and rhetoricians. I argued that these women authors hadn't been writing in a rhetorical room of their own. Instead, they were solving problems that the professionals could not. While writing the dissertation, I asked a friend who was in my program to read my chapter on the most popular book in the nineteenth-century United States, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The Impassive Novel: “Brain-Building” in Walter Pater's Mari us the Epicurean

Abstract: Walter Pater’s writings advance an affective historicism: an embodied experience of the past that Pater conceived in dialogue with Victorian neuroscience. Pater theorized art’s freedom from the pre...

Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory

Abstract: Studying the medieval prosimetrum, a genre that mixes narrative with lyric, could have important ramifications for the general study of poetics. By disrupting transhistorical theories of the lyric, which proceed from a presumed continuity between ancient Greece and modernity, the prosimetrum situates the Middle Ages at the center of our understanding of modern lyric poetry. Instead of beginning with a late-eighteenth-century understanding of lyric poetry as a self-expressive voice, which scholars must then localize in a poem's historical conditions, language, and genres, the prosimetrum begins with a conventional, rhetorical poem in a variety of stated genres and then, by including a narrative frame, stages that poem as a heartfelt song sung by lovesick knights or clerks. In the prosimetrum, the playful game of conventional art, which defines the medieval love lyric in isolation, suddenly becomes a way to imagine fictional subjectivities.

The Literary Dubbing of Confession

Abstract: Although the united states lost the vietnam war on the battlefield, it won the war on two long-term fronts: economic ideology and cultural memory. A mere eleven years after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Vietnamese government officially transitioned from a ration economy to a market-socialist one. This perestroika resulted in capitalist development, more akin to what the United States had propagated when it entered the war to prevent the cascading growth of communism throughout Asia. The United States also triumphed in terms of memory, dominating narratives of the war through the global influence of its culture industries.

Slips and Slides

Abstract: It has already become a critical commonplace to begin a discussion of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) by invoking its powerful opening declaration: I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.

Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies

Abstract: How might scholars extrapolate from the material evidence of “used books” to build larger narratives that help us make sense of the past, without reducing it again to grand, progressivist theories? The history of reading, and book history more generally, would benefit from an exploration of frameworks that extend beyond those of linear time and discrete periodization, and media and technology studies might help lead the way. his essay juxtaposes two annotations left in a set of cut-and-paste biblical harmonies made at the religious household of Little Gidding in the 1630s and 1640s. The first is a seventeenth-century note left by King Charles I; the second is a cut-up booklet made by an anonymous reader in the nineteenth century. Comparing these two moments of reading reveals the urgency of expanding the historical horizons of literary studies and deepening its engagement with theories of time, media, and materiality.

Between “I” and “We”: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Interethnic Multitudes

Abstract: The rise of an interethnic imagination in recent american literature has been remaking what we think of as ethnic fiction into interethnic fiction. While memory, history, and tradition continue as shaping forces in American letters, an urge toward encounter with others is vividly reworking fictional structures, plots, casts of characters, and uses of language, as well as social visions, literary ambitions, and currents of intertextual influence. In some cases, the mind of a protagonist or narrator, indeed the very mind of a text, comes to seem the site of a momentous encounter of peoples, a living human nexus (Rody). Such is the case in the fiction of Viet Thanh Nguyen, in which the interethnic impulse generates a remarkable pronominal drama, a performance that oscillates between a narratorial “I” and a “we” to negotiate—across the pain and struggle of war, dislocation, and immigrant Americanization and across disparate political and literary allegiances—a Vietnamese American voice.

Language Strange: The Romantic Scene of Instruction in Twenty-First-Century Turkey

Abstract: Reflecting on my experience of teaching British Romantic literature at a Turkish university, this essay addresses the current conversation about global English by exploring the intersections among second-language literary study, translation theory, and Romantic aesthetics. It begins with a reconsideration of orientalism that traces a foreignizing impulse in canonical Romanticism, links this with Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie (“estrangement”), and goes on to propose foreign language study as the exemplary instance of Romantic or Shklovskian aesthetic experience. Turning next to recent accounts, by Emily Apter and others, of Istanbul as the birthplace of “translational transnationalism,” I juxtapose the utopianism of contemporary translation theory with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic ideal of “untranslatableness.” I conclude with a reading of Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow, particularly its homage to Coleridge's “Kubla Khan,” as a meditation on translatability, before briefly revisiting the Turkish Romantic classroom and its global English futurity.

Bring Up the Bodies: The Classical Concept of Poetic Vividness and Its Reevaluation in Holocaust Literature

Abstract: The scenario of someone gazing at corpses plays an important role in the work of three authors representing three generations of Holocaust literature: Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and Jonathan Littell. Plato and Aristotle used this scenario to address a key question raised by the concept of poetic vividness, which they defined as putting a described scene before the reader's eyes: If literature shows us gruesome sights that we should not desire to see or enjoy seeing, does this make literature a form of voyeurism? Weiss, Sebald, and Littell evoke corpse gazing in the context of the Holocaust to answer this question and to articulate unique poetic philosophies that respond to the challenge to literature's validity constituted by the Holocaust. The diferent ways in which they use corpse gazing reveal how Holocaust literature has changed and continues to change as the era of survivor testimony wanes.

The Ethnic Author Represents the Body Count

Abstract: Reviews of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) regularly cite the vietnamese-french-american protagonist's self-characterization: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” (1). A less-cited version of the same characterization appears later in the novel: “I am a lie, a keeper, a book. No! I am a fly, a creeper, a gook. No! I am—I am—I am—” (325). Nguyen's unnamed narrator, a Northern Vietnamese spy with Southern sympathies, has exploited, betrayed, and even murdered his own. If the above statements are any indication, this Cold War history of slippery allegiances takes an existential toll. But the second statement adds a layer of intrigue. With rhyme, anaphora, and considerable theatrical aplomb, it transmutes ethnic duplicity into literary figuration and casts the narrator as another murderer with a fancy prose style. Murder and style, though, are not Nguyen's only connection to Vladimir Nabokov, whom Mark McGurl takes as iconic of the “codification and intensification of modernist reflexivity in the form of … ‘metafiction’” (9). Like Lolita and much of Nabokov's other fiction, The Sympathizer and many of Nguyen's writings hold up that special mirror of “modernist reflexivity.” For Nguyen, however, the chance to wield this mirror comes with the added responsibility of being a Vietnamese American author writing about Vietnamese America. Hence, if Nabokov's iction delivered “an elaborately performative ‘I am’” that enabled his “programmatic self-establishment” (10), Nguyen's equally performative “I am” instantiates not only an authorial program but also a political program of ethnic representation.

Aggregation, Public Criticism, and the History of Reading Big Data

Abstract: This essay traces the history of ideas behind the critical methods of distant reading and macroanalysis, modes of criticism enabled by the rise of the science, media, and technology of aggregation. I situate these methods in the intellectual shifts marked by the advent of modern polling practices, computational census technologies, post-1945 marketing strategies, and other methods of analyzing an aggregated public. Drawing on work by Sarah E. Igo, Mary Poovey, Bill Kovarik, and others, I demonstrate that the ideas legitimated through these shifts in technology and public sentiment are fundamental to the types of claims made in the “big data” digital humanities. This attention to intellectual history raises important problems and qualifications for big data methods like distant reading, particularly regarding their underlying assumptions about the publics of literary history.

Aging with Austen

Abstract: In 2015 i received a letter from the mla informing me that since i had now been a member for forty years, i no longer had to pay dues. hat should have been welcome news, but I was horrified. Could I be that old? Had I actually given papers and chaired sessions at some thirty-five annual meetings since 1975, as my hastily consulted curriculum vitae proclaimed? hough rhetorical, the questions prompted a nostalgic encounter with a few nearly forgotten conference talks and a deeper contemplation of the person who delivered them. (How) had my reading and writing altered across the decades in which I moved from graduate student through the tenure ranks to professor emerita? What had it meant to age as a reader? Or, for the purposes of this short meditation, what had it meant to age as a reader of Jane Austen, whose presence threads through my teaching and writing from beginning to not-yet end?

Introduction–Time for Reading

Abstract: special issue of MLN forthcoming in 2019. T HE FIRST HALF OF ALI SMITH’S DEBUT NOVEL, LIKE (1997), FOL­ lows a winding journey, from the seaside in Scotland, south to Cambridge, on to Pompeii, and back again, that is taken by Kate Shone and her mother, Amy. Smith introduces these characters at a time when eightyearold Kate is beginning to discover books, “eating and sleeping with them, living by the book, you might say” (151). Late in the novel, we will learn that Amy was formerly that sort of bookish child herself: the passage just quoted gives us Amy remembering an earlier life. Amy is presented initially, however, as having lost her capacity to comprehend written words—a consequence of a trauma that, we infer, may have involved her daughter’s birth. Kate has thus come to serve in this household as the translator who deciphers the words on the fronts of shops or buses. Amy, as Kate puts it to herself, “peers hard at the shapes of them and shakes her head and has to ask Kate” (27). Earlier we have seen the eightyearold Kate poring over One Hundred and One Great Wonders of the World, which she has been concealing from her mother (who now is likely as not to use books, which she cannot read, to prop up an unsteady table or light a ire). Reading over Kate’s shoulder, we too stumble over the name “Rud Yard Kip ling”:

Immortality, Romanticism, and the Limit of the Liberal Imagination

Abstract: At Margaret hatcher's funeral, in 2013, attendees received a program with William Wordsworth's Immortality Ode printed on the back. This was unsurprising. he ode has always been popular with igures who champion liberal capitalist democracy as the most efective form of governance, one that delivers reform through incremental change and pragmatic policies rather than revolutionary idealism. Framed by the current unrest in Western civic life, this essay paints a darker picture of this reigning political order. Considering readings of the ode by John Stuart Mill, Cleanth Brooks, and Lionel Trilling, I suggest that the poem allowed liberal intellectuals to romanticize reformist politics. For these readers, Wordsworth reveals a core of sublime possibility within systems built on routinized order. However, idealizing a gradualist approach to reform allows progress to be pushed into the future indeinitely. Tracing the commitment to practical sublimity may reveal an emergent theory of liberal technocracy, in which citizens are compelled to operate under a vast, incomprehensible array of protocols that never quite deliver meaningful social change.

Behind the Seams: The “Colored Historian” of the White House and Her Parodists

Abstract: The African American author Elizabeth Keckly has garnered signiicant attention in recent decades as a result of renewed interest in her memoir and expose of the family of Abraham Lincoln, Behind the Scenes; or, hirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868). Meanwhile, the anonymous author who, writing as “Betsey Kickley,” viciously parodied her book in Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman Who Took in Work from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis (1868) has remained an enigma. his essay identiies the mysterious author of Behind the Seams as Daniel Ottolengui, a Jewish newspaper correspondent and writer from Charleston, South Carolina. he parody was reprinted in 1945 by another pseudonymous author, identiied here as the Manhattan-based book dealer Charles P. Everitt. he contents and contexts of both editions of Behind the Seams illustrate the enduring inluence of Keckly's challenge to hegemonic narratives of American history.

Literally: How to Speak Like an Absolute Knave

Abstract: A family of Shakespearean characters I call “the perverse literalists” takes the figurative language of their interlocutors in the most literal sense. While they make us laugh, these characters’ pe...

How Do We Write, Now?

Abstract: How do we write, now? since i am writing for the pages of the publications of the modern language association of america, I presume the “we” here describes teachers of literature in the United States. I, outside in that “we,” think that most of us write, for a variety of reasons, with the presumed inclusion of “the global South” in our audience; although I also have the feeling that a lot of us, folks that I do not really know, ignore this requirement altogether. Geraldine Heng's important work has made us aware of this absence in the study of the literature of the Middle Ages. From the early modern era on, however, progressive writing does have this cultural requirement.

The Master’s Voice: A Close Reading of James

Abstract: I find myself returning to the theme of reading against noise and reimagining it as something more like reading up against noise, in which noise is a foe or fiend, something one is up against: not only a challenge, close and insistent, that presents itself whenever one takes up a text (the literal noise that invades one's chair or couch, the ads in the margins of an e-book or a Web page, the wandering thoughts or obligations that draw one away), but also a challenge that is spatially there—up against one's ears and body, encroaching on the very space of one's reading. To read, in this sense, is thus inevitably to come up against noise, to attempt to overcome it–and yet to keep it, as part of the very act of reading, within reach.